By Infrascale Guest Blog 1

Talk to any of your IT peers and a top strategic priority they constantly hear reverberating through their organization is “simplify technology.” It’s being driven from the top down, as evidenced by IDC’s recent State of the CIO survey, which indicated business leaders want the “CIO to simplify technology”.

So, what does this have to do with backup? Backup is one of the unsung heroes of IT. It isn’t flashy, but it’s essential. And it is definitely not simple, especially when it comes to appliance sizing to meet data growth demands.   This frustrating and costly pain point is what we call yesterday’s backup. This current method is complex and typically follows this flow:

This puts a fair amount of risk on correctly sizing the appliance, so it fits your needs today and tomorrow, making these use cases all too familiar:

Can your business afford these sizing mistakes? If you’re like most, the answer is no.

Enter Tomorrow’s Backup

Tomorrow’s backup converges these four technologies into one appliance:

This convergence enables a new approach to backup that allows IT to do the following:

At the same time, this convergence approach makes it possible for IT to make the cloud the center of their backup universe so they can take advantage of the infinite scalability of the cloud. This means when data growth increases, you buy more cloud, not another appliance.

How Does This Eliminate Appliance Sizing Risk?

With built-in cloud spillover (think cloud storage gateway technology), your hybrid appliance automatically streams data from your on-premise device to the cloud, and grows per your own data retention rules. Having the ability to determine what stays local while enabling a “bottomless cloud” backup model (because everything is streaming there) does two things:

So, when it comes to appliance sizing, you can completely avoid the scenarios described above. This also simplifies the appliance sizing process so that it looks like this:

Key Takeaway

Eliminating appliance-sizing risk is the tip of the iceberg when you take steps to simplify backup. Embracing a new approach to backup puts your company in a better position to reap the monetary savings and efficiency gains from the cloud. It’s how tomorrow’s backup works, and we can help you get there. We provide a hybrid cloud solution that’s wickedly fast, scales the way the cloud was meant to, and so simple our customers tell us that they spend just a few minutes a week managing it. Check out this e-book to help you decide if it’s time to break up with your backup and what requirements your next-gen cloud backup solution should have.

Ken Garcia is the director of content marketing at Infrascale. Guest blogs such as this one are published monthly and are part of MSPmentor’s annual platinum sponsorship.