Hybrid work has changed everything — from the way employees communicate to the infrastructure needed to keep them connected, secure and productive, something that covid has taught us (even the companies that refused work from a home policy before it) was that, employees could work from home quite happily and productively provided they given the tools and access into their corporate environment. But outside of the corporate firewalls means that using BYOD and even company-provided devices can pose a huge threat to the network.
An outlook on market trends
IDC predicts in their report that 55.9 billion devices will generate more than 79 zettabytes of data in the next two years., supercharged by a surge of work-from-home models allowing IoT devices and unauthorised devices to live outside the corporate network yet still consuming corporate IT resources – introducing a mammoth challenge for the modern-day IT operations team. How does one protect the edge in 2022 and beyond?
This is the question the IT operations team are now having to (reluctantly) ask themselves, keeping the same level of service for their existing infrastructure and somehow extending to these edge devices.
In fact, back in 2018 – Gartner predicted that by 2025, 75% of data will be processed outside the traditional data centre or cloud — what this means is processed at the edge.
This new trend certainly introduces risks and problems, let’s consider some of these:
Data sets become silos. – By having data kept outside of the company firewall and network, These silos tax IT staff, create inefficiencies and greater complexity trying to provide adequate data protection for them
Visibility and Reporting – If they aren’t operating on your network, then you don’t necessarily have visibility into what needs to be protected – Furthermore, Because data protection happens in silos, you have to pull information manually from each backup server location and from multiple applications and then aggregate it all into a report. That means the reports lack consistency, making it easy to miss critical errors.
Performance – Edge devices aren’t close to your own infrastructure, whether it be in a public cloud or in your own data centre – Creating cross-network penalties when transferring data. Longer backup windows (and restores) are the result of distributed architecture and far end data processing.
Cost – The fact of the matter is, that having these edge devices outside the corporate network is going to require more resources, additional backup servers and licensing to cover these devices as well as additional management overhead
While there is no one solution to comprehensively solve each of these problems, you can install some best practices in your backup environment when protecting the edge.
3 Best practices for Edge protection
1) Gain visibility fast and obtain buy-in from your customers – That is, by allowing your users to BYOD and still allow them to function on the company network provided they agree to certain measures to ensure you can extend the same level of data protection SLA to them as you would company owned assets – Don’t ignore these devices or try to combat it. BYOD is here to stay
2) Architect for the edge – The devices you are aiming to protect are no doubt on a different network. Prone to disconnects and being shut down a lot – Think about a way to be able to offer resumable backup methods to cater for this.
5) Empower your customer – By offering features like End-user self-service file restore – You can allow your customers to become part of the team and complete their own restores. Doing this also allows your team to focus on higher-order operational tasks
How can BDRSuite help with Edge protection?
1) Protection of Edge – BDRSuite offers Continuous Data Protection for the file & folders from the Windows & Mac file Endpoints allowing users with Windows-based or MacOS personal devices to remain protected through file and folder backup in both operating system flavours
2) Efficient Backup windows – With incremental backup capability, BDRSuite allows delta change tracking allowing backups to pause and resume (as they are not always going to be connected to the corporate network.
3) Same level of flexibility – Vembu Cloud backup for endpoints allows scheduling, as well as restoring back to anywhere – users can specify where they want the recovered file or folder to be restored to.
4) Previous Versions integration – Window users can leverage this to recover their own file right from within Windows explorer –
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