Companies must protect their valuable data resources against a highly varied threat landscape. Cybercriminals employ sophisticated methods to introduce malware or ransomware into IT environments. Businesses can lose data through the activities of malicious insiders or by mistakes made by trusted employees. Companies that neglect backups expose themselves to unnecessary risk.
Organizations make a critical decision when selecting a backup and recovery solution to protect their data. Decision-makers must choose the right solution from various options with different strengths and capabilities. It can be challenging to make the correct choice from among the available products and platforms.
Roger Dombrowski is a veteran data protection specialist who has spent over 15 years at VAST IT Services. He has been on the front lines as data protection has transitioned from a strictly on-premises activity to its current state, where cloud resources are employed heavily. His experience implementing and maintaining data protection solutions for numerous clients gives him an excellent perspective on backup tools.
So, let’s bypass the marketing hype and get some honest advice from Roger on the strengths of backup tools that actually deliver the data protection your company needs.
Veritas
Veritas has been a major player in the data protection field since the 1980s and enjoys a significant installed base. The company supports the most extensive range of old and new workloads. While legacy Veritas NetBackup is known for its superior tape management, the solution has kept pace with IT evolution. It can store backups with OST vendors or use their proprietary disk or cloud object storage.
The Veritas ecosystem involves supporting a substantial amount of code, which causes the company to make strategic choices when adding new features. Roger has observed that while the market dictates the latest features a data protection vendor must adopt, Veritas may take an extra quarter or two before adding the new attribute. He also notes that the wait is usually worthwhile, with Veritas delivering a better and more mature product with cool, innovative elements.
Roger points out the Veritas solution’s excellent flexibility for companies willing to build independently or with VAST’s expert assistance. Veritas’ data protection platform is suited to large and small environments, with robust support for remote sites and the ability to be configured for massive data ingest. Companies can minimize cloud and on-premises storage by leveraging Veritas’s great deduplication engine.
Additional strengths of Veritas include support for a wide variety of cloud vendors, not just the big three. The tool facilitates many migration and fail-over use cases, such as on-premises to cloud infrastructure or cloud-to-cloud. Veritas can back up virtually any data resource to any storage solution and has outstanding database agent support. The Veritas platform features an award-winning, rock-solid appliance form factor and exceptional reporting capabilities.
Cohesity
Cohesity appeared on the scene in 2015 and quickly gained notoriety as a market disruptor for its innovative features. The company’s proprietary filesystem lets users deduplicate data while preserving fully hydrated snapshots. Cohesity’s instant mass restore capabilities allow teams to instantly present hundreds of VM workloads to the ESX infrastructure. The solution is built on a clustered infrastructure with erasure coding capabilities that offers highly available, unlimited scale, non-disruptive updates, upgrades, and hardware repair or replacement.
The ramifications of this technology and feature set have disrupted the backup space, positively affecting everything from dev/ops to cyber resiliency. Roger sees Cohesity as a trailblazer and forward-looking company, as demonstrated by their idea of enabling organizations to mine value from their backup data. Software vendors can develop products that query a company’s backup data to provide benefits like malware scanning and compliance reporting. Cohesity’s generative AI feature, GAIA, supports using large language models to create complex queries and extract value from backup data.
Roger favorably compares Cohesity’s on-premises functionality with Veritas’s, giving their as-a-service platform good grades. Cohesity’s as-a-service model, combined with its on-premises offering, provides customers with comprehensive data protection in hybrid environments.
Druva
Druva gained attention in 2008 by protecting endpoints and endpoint devices. In 2013, the company pivoted to its current as-a-service model. They are the most mature company operating in the cloud-hosted, as-a-service space. VAST has built its Cloud Backup-as-a-Service (CBaaS) using Druva’s technology.
Roger notes that while Druva supports on-premises workloads, the platform shines in a cloud-to-cloud implementation. On-prem resources can leverage a VM-based cloud cache device (CCD) that keeps frequently accessed data close. The CCD can become massive and resource-intensive when protecting large, on-premises workloads. Customers need to ensure they have sufficient bandwidth to handle the cloud data transfer requirements of Druva’s solution.
Druva’s outstanding capabilities include immutable backups to protect sensitive data and ensure regulatory compliance. The solution’s curated recovery feature streamlines and accelerates ransomware recovery by creating a “golden snapshot” containing the most recent unencrypted versions of data. Teams can quickly and efficiently address ransomware attacks by extracting uncompromised files from various backups.
Migrating to a New Data Protection Solution
Roger provides insight into migrating a legacy Veritas environment to a new data protection solution and outlines the following advantages and disadvantages of three possibilities.
Veritas to Veritas—This is a relatively easy swap requiring minimal reconfiguration. Teams can preserve all policy and configuration parameters during the migration. However, this route can be expensive and result in a complex environment that requires expert management.
Veritas to Cohesity – Migrating to Cohesity enables an organization to start fresh with new technology. Benefits of migration include features like instant mass restore capabilities, a dedicated cyber response team, threat intelligence, and malware scanning. Potential drawbacks are the new technology to learn and reconstruct data protection policies and configurations.
Veritas to Druva – This is the easiest path for customers to maintain since it is wholly hosted as a service. It’s an excellent solution for cloud-based infrastructure. Druva is not the best model for on-premises protection, and backups may not be stored close to the original workloads.
Contact us today to learn how we can help you select, implement, and maintain backup tools that deliver the performance you need to protect your business.
