Fit for Purpose? Can Traditional Vendors Deliver on NAS Backup?

Protecting your network-attached storage (NAS) data either in the data center or to the cloud requires a solution that understands the complexity of file data. Traditional backup solutions are often expensive and complex technologies that are not built to backup NAS. They generally use old approaches or hastily built solutions – and anyone who knows NAS, knows that it is anything but simple.

What’s more, many companies just want to make a ‘golden copy’ of their data either on another NAS or in the cloud. Doing this with traditional backup solutions can be extremely expensive and most of them just don’t work at scale anyway. Why? Well, backup companies come from the world of VMs, applications, and databases and their market is very mature and extremely crowded. Traditional enterprise backup companies are highly competitive and successful in their own right, but what they have in common is that each of them have treated the backup of NAS data in the same way: either they quietly ignore the customer need or use old technologies.

More recently, some of the leading vendors have looked to buy or build solutions to fill their capability gaps. But questions remain, particularly over any solutions that are hastily put together to address what customers now clearly see as a strategic need. Ultimately, some organizations will use these nascent NAS data protection technologies because they already have the backup solution in-house for the other requirements. However, as we are seeing from customers, buying one of these solutions purely for NAS backup is both cost prohibitive and ineffective.

But giving up on NAS backup isn’t the solution. Snapshots and replication offer steps towards data protection, but are not a complete solution. It is also important to add an additional layer of data protection in the form of point-in-time/versioned backups that are stored on separate media, a separate device, in an immutable form, and can be restored to any system. In light of recent ransomware attacks crippling governments and businesses, it is more important than ever to start protecting your NAS data again, and to be able to do it at scale and affordably.

Using a solution that is fundamentally designed at the core to manage unstructured data is the simplest, safest, and most cost-effective way to protect NAS data. Such software understands the complexity of all NAS and object storage systems so enables enterprises to safeguard their data between any heterogeneous system either on-premises or in the cloud.

The results are customers who successfully meet their NAS protection and recovery objectives with the performance they need and doing so without having to resort to over-specified and expensive solutions that give them a quick option, rather than a purpose-built foundation. For more information about our approach to NAS protection, click here.