Affigent & Dell Technologies | How to Assemble a Data Protection Strategy Checklist
3 minutes
How to Assemble a Data Protection Strategy Checklist
According to IDC, 92% of organizations have adopted cloud environments, with 64% embracing multi-cloud strategies. However, as government agencies manage a mix of clouds and on-premises systems, protecting data across workloads while meeting compliance and security requirements becomes increasingly complex. Moreover, the rising threat of cybercrime, including ransomware attacks, adds to the challenge of curating a data protection strategy challenge.
To address these complexities and provide guidance, GovLoop collaborated with Dell Technologies and Affigent to offer a comprehensive checklist for simplifying data protection strategies.
The key solution lies in deploying data backup and recovery in the cloud. This approach should cover three critical areas: on-premises to the cloud, in-cloud, and disaster recovery to the cloud.
Efficiency, simplicity, and transparency are crucial aspects to consider when choosing a solution. Efficiency involves selecting a solution that quickly downloads backup data, minimizes data transfer, and reduces infrastructure requirements. Simplicity entails using tools that streamline data backup, making the process faster and more cost-effective. Transparency is vital, ensuring user-friendly data protection through self-service and automated tools for mission areas.
To further aid in the decision-making process, five essential attributes should be considered in a data protection solution. These include adopting a public cloud-based SaaS model or leased co-location space, ensuring reliability and scalability for cloud-hosted and on-premises applications, offering continuous backup with point-in-time recovery, enabling proactive monitoring and analysis, and providing robust reporting and backup file search capabilities for ease of administration.
When evaluating vendor solutions, it is essential to ask key questions regarding solution resilience, protection against cyber threats, and support for recovery from cyberattacks.
For government agencies, an enterprise-grade data protection checklist is critical. This includes essential capabilities like backup and restore, protection for virtual and physical servers, data protection across different environments, disaster recovery, and point-in-time recovery, as well as flexible deployment options.
For comprehensive protection, agencies should prioritize multi-cloud optimization with backup, recovery, and long-term retention, aligning data protection with business objectives and ensuring support for multiple hypervisors from a single solution.
Finally, leveraging automation with features like automated policy management and automated discovery of databases and storage can significantly enhance data protection efficiency.
Selecting the right data protection solution is crucial for government agencies. It not only ensures compliance and security but also safeguards critical data across various cloud and on-premises environments. For a more detailed overview, check out our full infographic.
