ABSTRACT
Data protection may be a form of an insurance policy, but businesses seeking to creatively leverage their IT investments and wanting to drive through cost optimization are increasingly looking at data protection as a mechanism to achieve those goals. Thus, data protection is also becoming an enabler for new processes around data movement and data processing. A progressive and adaptable data protection environment will be layered, use appropriate tools, enable automation and orchestration, and will integrate at the most important layer: reporting and monitoring. Ideally, as business requirements change with the system being built as a framework, appropriate products to provide protection should be slotted into the protection layer, and products no longer required should be retired without disruption to the business or the business functions. The monitoring/reporting and orchestration/automation layers should be the visible aspects of data protection and resemble the proverbial duck on a pond.
