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Recent analyst research indicates why hybrid multicloud support is becoming increasingly important. According to a 2019 ESG report [1], 67 percent of organizations surveyed currently use public cloud services in their data protection environment. Among those companies, on average 26 percent of their protection environments (measured by amount of data) are housed in the cloud, a number which is expected to grow to 35 percent in 24 months. Hence, although most organizations store the majority of their data on premises, public clouds are becoming a more prevalent part of their data protection strategy.

Unifying data management in hybrid multicloud environments is a key aspect of IBM modern data protection. Demonstrating our commitment to this principle, IBM Storage recently announced significant enhancements to IBM Spectrum Protect Plus. These are designed to improve its overall functionality while increasing its capabilities within multicloud environments that are rapidly becoming prevalent throughout our client base.

At the top of the list of IBM Spectrum Protect Plus innovations, the solution has added the ability, from a single pane of glass, to backup, recovery, and reuse Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server, IBM Db2, and MongoDB databases running both on premises and on Amazon Web Services (AWS).

Commenting on the value of this particular enhancement, Joseph King, CTO, VP Presales & Technology Services, CAS Severn, notes:

“IBM Spectrum Protect Plus’ ability to back up databases running on AWS gives us the ability to centrally manage Oracle, Microsoft SQL, Db2 and MongoDB backup, replication, and recovery for clients that have workloads running both on premises and in the cloud. This is an exciting new capability that streamlines backup administration and reduces the cost of disaster recovery.”

Additionally, IBM Spectrum Protect Plus has added the ability to recover on-premises workloads from IBM Spectrum Protect Plus backup repositories stored in AWS. IBM Spectrum Protect Plus is available on the AWS Marketplace and backup repositories can be automatically deployed on an Amazon EC2 instance from an Amazon Machine Image (AMI).

In addition, IBM Spectrum Protect Plus data archival has added support for Amazon S3 Glacier, Microsoft Azure Archive Storage and IBM Cloud Object Storage Archive. IBM Spectrum Protect Plus also supports the ability to air-gap data on tape, helping you keep your data safe from malware and ransomware attacks. Dirk Osten, Central Infrastructure Team Backup & Recovery, Volkswagen Financial Services, comments:

“Adhering to financial industry regulations is a critical requirement for Volkswagen Financial Services. IBM Spectrum Protect Plus’ support for physical tape is a key capability that will help see that our data backups are both compliant and air-gapped for cyber resiliency.”

These new IBM Spectrum Protect Plus capabilities build on enhancements announced in February 2019, including cost-effective data retention and disaster recovery utilizing data offload to public cloud services such as the IBM Cloud Object Storage service, AWS S3, and Microsoft Azure Blob, as well as IBM Cloud Object Storage and IBM Spectrum Protect for on-premises object storage. Companies using IBM Cloud Object Storage can achieve secured data retention using immutable object storage, also known as write-once-read-many (WORM) technology. This ability to lock-down data is an important part of an overall cyber resilience plan.

Moreover, IBM modern data protection continues to deliver enhancements on multiple fronts. IBM Spectrum Protect has added support for AWS S3 Intelligent Tiering, which is designed to automatically tier inactive data to an Infrequent Access class. IBM Spectrum Protect for Data Retention has expanded to support IBM Spectrum Scale immutable filesets. And IBM Spectrum Protect web client now supports the ability to remotely recover files from backups on Linux on Z and Linux on Power Systems, which helps expand the current ability to recover files from backups on Windows and Linux on x86. Also, IBM Spectrum Protect Plus Db2 backup support has been extended to include databases that span multiple partitions.

Virtually all enterprises will soon be leveraging the advantages of hybrid multicloud architectures.[2] IBM Storage has strongly embraced the multicloud paradigm and the stream of enhancements to IBM modern data protection demonstrates our commitment to continued innovation.

Learn more about today’s IBM Storage announcements and join the webcast to hear more about how we are enhancing IBM Storage for data protection in hybrid multicloud environments.

[1] Source: ESG Research Insight Paper, Trends in Modern Data Protection, March 2019

[2] IBM Institute for Business Value: Assembling Your Cloud Orchestra, October 2018

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