Over the past few years, the cybersecurity landscape has evolved profoundly, fuelled by entire workforces moving to home during the pandemic, and data growth that has seemed to be unstoppable. Both factors have driven a lot of complexity, which, compounded by new data security and privacy regulations, are seeing CIOs struggling to keep up.

“Moreover, all these factors unite to create the perfect storm against a context of IT and digital transformation,” says Chris Larkins, Dell Enterprise Business Unit manager at Tarsus Distribution, South Africa’s leading ICT distributor. Similarly, the cloud is fundamentally altering the way in which IT supports business objectives and mandates today, with its usage becoming ubiquitous.

He says with a mixture of on-premises, off-premises, hyperscale, hybrid and multi-cloud, these technologies have become strategic tools for today’s technical teams and are providing the ideal platform on which to run mission-critical processes and applications.

Reach out to Tarsus Distribution today for more

Business applications are also skyrocketing in terms of growth, particularly those in the cloud, with companies moving business-critical applications to infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) and software-as-a-service (SaaS) environments, Larkins explains. “And it goes without saying, that wherever mission-critical workloads sit, data protection and availability services have to be deployed to protect organisations against downtime, data loss and data theft, which could result in financial losses, regulatory fines and a loss of customer confidence.”

Something else that is affecting the data protection landscape, Larkins says, is that service-level agreements usually tracked for data protection, recovery time objective (RTO) and recovery point objective (RPO), are extremely stringent and extensive. Research by ESG revealed that 15% of organisations said they could tolerate zero downtime at all for their mission-critical applications; another 42% claimed their mission-critical applications have to be back online in less than one hour; and a whopping 90% said they could not tolerate more than one hour of lost “mission critical” data.

One thing is clear, and that is that the future is data-driven and infocentric, and having the right data at the right time will make or break the business. “Businesses across the board are developing new data-centric products and services to help them stay ahead of the curve. The maxim today that data is the new oil is true. It has never been more of a critical asset to the business than it is today, and at the same time, a major challenge because of its exponential growth, the complexity that goes hand-in-hand with it, and the stringent data protection and compliance laws that must be adhered to.”

Protecting data

Larkins says these mandates are incredibly hard to meet for any business that doesn’t have the appropriate type of infrastructure in place. “This is where Dell Technologies’ portfolio of data-protection solutions comes in, as it can help entities of every size, and in every market segment, tackle a slew of challenges at the same time.”

Firstly, Dell’s PowerProtect Data Manager helps businesses protect data and deliver governance control for modern workloads across today’s ever-changing physical, virtual and cloud environments. “This software-defined data protection platform helps address evolving growth and IT complexity, bringing next-generation data protection to organisations, that drives faster IT transformation, while giving them the peace of mind they need: that their data is safe and secure.”

In fact, he says, Dell has built a full set of solutions for data protection, while remaining laser-focused on continual innovation as workloads, customer needs and cyber actors evolve. “This has resulted in a stable of data-protection solutions that have a proven ability to secure almost any workload, be it physical, virtual, container-based, cloud-native or SaaS.

With IT infrastructure in a constant state of flux, Dell has also thoroughly addressed data protection requirements for a variety of environments, including edge and core, and a wide range of cloud scenarios. “Guaranteeing availability irrespective of the type of data type wherever it may reside brings operational benefits and the peace of mind that data protection SLAs for customers are met. “The PowerProtect portfolio also gives clients the choice and flexibility to implement either data protection appliances or data protection software solutions that meet their unique data-protection needs,” Larkins explains.

The fact that it is software-defined means that data protection is flexible, as is compliance across applications and cloud-native IT environments

In addition, Dell’s offering promises software-defined data protection, deduplication, automated discovery, self-service, operational agility and IT governance for all environment: physical, virtual and cloud. “It also features next-generation cloud data protection, with PowerProtect Data Manager offering efficient data-protection capabilities that leverage the latest evolution of Dell EMC trusted protection storage architecture.”

Similarly, he says with operational simplicity, agility and flexibility at its heart, the solution enables the protection, management and recovery of data in all environments, regardless of whether they are on-premises, virtualised or cloud deployments, and this includes the protection of in-cloud workloads. Users can also protect cloud-native workloads across a slew of public clouds via Dell’s integrated, SaaS-based PowerProtect Cloud Snapshot Manager.

In addition, users can simplify virtual machine (VM) image backups with practically no impact on VMs, and can streamline data protection directly for applications or Kubernetes containers, to Dell EMC PowerProtect appliances, which helps to reduce application resource constraints.

The benefits are many, Larkins adds. “Users can increase business resiliency with PowerProtect Cyber Recovery capabilities to quickly recover in the event of a cyber incident. The solution’s modular design enables agile delivery of any new features and updates, enabling businesses to quickly evolve to meet future IT demands. The fact that it is software-defined means that data protection is flexible, as is compliance across applications and cloud-native IT environments.”

For more information on Dell’s innovative data protection solutions and to partner with professionals to scope and design a solution that gives you the confidence of knowing that your data is safeguarded across all environments, reach out to Tarsus Distribution today.