Data protection is a mess, be it your organization or any other. We have our sensitive data scattered across laptops, mobile, DC & DRs, multiple clouds and across hundreds of applications. More often than not, we don’t even know what we have and where,forget about using it to gather insight. Usually only about 20% of the data is active and used daily, close to 80% of our data is secondary and we have little or no clue about it. Across organisations, data protection comes into picture when there is some compliance/legal/critical financial need or someone higher up the ladder makes our life miserable when they lose their data.

Another significant problem is the silo-ed approach by most of the vendors and service providers. We all provide different solution for different use cases. Saas backup solution will not be good for file backup, file or object backup solution will not suit endpoint backup and when you need to get intelligence from the data, you will need to federate it to another analytics and visualization application (that becomes a separate story all together). Add the complexity or choosing appliance or cloud or federated landscape. And once in a while when you need to retrieve it, every solution begins with a hiccup.

One need but multiple solutions and vendors and offerings. Except for few, none approach the need of protection/retrieval and analytics as a single systemic requirement. Hence the need to be systemic from the beginning.

So where do we start?

• Begin with a spoc for data protection even if it’s a one man team
• Do not club Data Protection & Data Security as one strategy
• Have a strategic approach towards data protection
• Every new software/app addition should have be linked to your holistic data protection plan
• Use you historical data to gain insight, you will be surprised how valuable it can be
• Retrieval – this is what you should definitely look at from the start

To conclude, onus lies on us to have a systemic approach. Begin with a five year horizon and surely look for a PoC to find the best fit for your need. Make it “COMPLEX” free because IT is not your business but IT is there to augment your core business