If you are like many organizations, as your business needs changed, you have deployed a variety of data protection solutions over the years.
You have protected your most critical data sources with one or more solutions specific to those data sources – sometimes referred to generically as ‘point solutions’.
After a period of time, you are left with a complicated mix of data protection solutions and no easy way to confirm if all of your critical data is adequately protected from data loss or breach.
2. The Problem With Point Solutions
If you are like many organizations, as your business needs
changed, you have deployed a variety of data protection
solutions over the years.
You have protected your most critical data sources with one
or more solutions specific to those data sources –
sometimes referred to generically as ‘point solutions’.
After a period of time, you are left with a complicated mix of
data protection solutions and no easy way to confirm if all
of your critical data is adequately protected from data loss
or breach.
3. 5 Problems with Point Solutions
1. Designed for Specific use Cases
2. Rarely Unified
3. No Transparency or Control
4. Inconsistent Protection Levels
5. Too expensive
4. Designed for Specific use Cases
Point data protection solutions work very well for a small handful
of specific use cases of which they were designed, but are
generally useless for any other scenarios.
Flickr: abdullah.khan2012
5. Rarely Unified
Even if point data protection solutions come from the same
vendor, there’s no guarantee they can be integrated or unified.
Therefore, IT admins will need to learn how to use different
tools, becoming less productive as a result.
Flickr: emily blincoe
6. No Transparency or Control
Point solutions provide neither an organization-wide view
nor control of your data protection. If you are unable to see
a complete and coherent picture of all your organization’s
data sources and their protection status in real time, you
can’t tell if all those data sources are being adequately
protected.
Instagram: @jayscale
7. Inconsistent Protection Levels
Different technologies provided by different vendors will almost always
offer different levels of protection. Even with guaranteed recovery of
lost data, the recovery times will likely differ. This is a problem if you
have two data sources that are equally important to your organization
being protected differently which you would then need to assess if the
different treatment is acceptable.
Flickr: emily blincoe
8. Too Expensive
Data protection point solutions often come with a lot of hidden
direct costs which can come in the form of paying extra for add-
on and complementary tools and features such as virtual
machine replication, mobile device management, and billing
modules. Moreover, different point solutions will have their own
license models which may require you to buy more capacity
than you need resulting in unnecessary expenses.
Flickr: auntneecey