GUIDE

Data protection
conversation
guide
Data protection is a high priority Why NetApp?
Data protection is a critical conversation for any Data protection is one of the key differentiators of
organization. The importance and growth of data, NetApp® ONTAP® data management software. An
combined with the ever-increasing threat of important part of the DNA of the storage software
cyberattacks, is drawing more and more resources is powerful data protection and security technology
to protecting and securing data. that dramatically improves the performance and
efficiency of data protection workloads, such as
According to a 2021 Komprise study, 63% of backup, disaster recovery, and continuous availability.
organizations are managing more than 1PB of data, When combined with our management tools and
with more than 30% of IT budgets spent on data independent software vendor partners, we can enable
storage and backups. And those numbers are customers to better protect and secure their most
expected to grow in the coming years. valuable asset, their data. We can eliminate backup
windows, move data more efficiently, secure data
An IDC study states that “Petabyte-scale deployments against cyberthreats, and increase ROI with data
are becoming commonplace. Traditional backup reuse, across a hybrid cloud.
methodologies can no longer cope with such data
volumes.” Another IDC study states that 500 million Who cares about data protection?
new logical applications will be created by 2023, as Those who care about data protection are the ones
many as were created in the last 40 years, which will who feel the pain when data is lost, corrupted, stolen,
generate massive volumes of structured, semi- or encrypted, or when applications go down. Which
structured, and unstructured data. means that everyone cares about protecting data.
However, there are particular roles that are
According to 451 Research, more than 35% of responsible for protecting data, and there are roles
customers list data growth as their #1 pain point that influence those decision makers.
for disaster recovery1. Ransomware is driving more
investment in data protection; 73% of respondents
claim that they are spending more to combat
ransomware.

Data protection personas

Influencers and decision makers

Influence and input Decision and implementation

Datacenter Manager Director Infrastructure IT

Defines space, power, Defines standards for protection
cooling requirements across enterprise

Database Owner
Business/Application/LOB
Defines database performance and
Defines application SLAs
availability requirements

Security/Regulatory Storage/VMware/
Infrastructure/Backup Admin
Defines security requirements,
Defines requirements, and
applies regulation
engineer solution

2 Data protection conversation guide

Discovery questions
The following questions are grouped by role within the organization.
Questions can also be used across departments.

Business or application leader (line of business)

Discovery questions Why this is relevant

Do you have challenges around data availability Understand the scope of the problem. Is the customer
and protection? trying to solve a protection problem with a new approach?
• Is this a new or existing application? Or by simply refreshing storage?

Has a business impact analysis been performed? Enterprise applications are the lifeblood of most
If not, is one planned? organizations. It’s important to calculate the amount of
• Cost of data loss data loss and downtime acceptable to the business.
• Cost of downtime The average cost of downtime today is between $100k
and $1M per outage. Classification of the customer’s
data is important, because not all data is created
equal. Depending on the application, the data support
determines how often data needs to be protected, how
quickly it needs to be made available, and how much
money the business will lose while the application and
data are not available.

Does the application have defined SLAs? Traditional data protection with streaming backups can
adversely impact applications by slowing storage response.
This impact determines the type of data protection and/or
availability methods that might be needed to meet SLAs.

Where do you host your data and applications? The location of the primary data and where the secondary
is located (for example, cloud object storage) obviously
impact the design of the proposed solution. That’s true
whether the solution is on premises, at a colocation
facility, or in a public or hybrid cloud.

What, if any, is your cloud strategy? Depending on where the applications run, NetApp
(Do you have a cloud first or hybrid solutions will be different. However, the underlying
cloud strategy?) performance and efficiency through ONTAP are the same.

Are there ransomware concerns? Data protection is a key part of ransomware protection.
Do you have a security team? According to 451 Research, 75% of organizations claim
to maintain at least one gold copy of data for protection.1
On-premises backup targets like virtual tape library and
object storage systems are the top choice of 67% of
respondents, while 52% choose public cloud storage.

Additionally, NetApp features like immutable Snapshot™

copies and indelible file locking with SnapLock®
compliance software are powerful protection against
cyberthreats.

3 Data protection conversation guide

 Discovery questions Why this is relevant

Are you bound by regulatory laws and rulings, Data retention is a key part of data protection. Snapshot
such as GDPR, CA law, etc.? Do you have a retention scheduling and SnapLock can help protect
regulatory team? regulated data.

Describe the value of your data. Does all of Determining what data is important to keep will help
your data have equal value? with sizing environments as well as with data protection
policies.

How do you protect your compute? Many applications have built in data protection
• Is the application resilient? capabilities, but they aren’t always efficient. The
combination of application protection and data
protection can be complementary.

Are your applications containerized? Persistent storage is essential for stateful containerized
applications. NetApp Astra™ Control is a set of powerful
software to help manage and protect containerized
application data. NetApp Cloud Backup now offers
support for containerized data as well. Ideal for
ONTAP focused IT environments.
Performance requirements? NetApp Snapshot based data protection has little to
no impact on storage performance. Copies are made
in seconds, eliminating the need for backup windows.
Understanding the performance requirements of the
application can help with positioning the NetApp solution
and determining whether synchronous or asynchronous
replication is possible.
Goals for organization or project? For example, what is the timeframe for the solution?

Business or application leader (line of business)

Discovery questions Why this is relevant

What databases are being protected? NetApp offers application-integrated protection with
SnapCenter® software. We support a broad list of
databases, including SQL and NoSQL databases.

How do you protect and provide data availability, Many applications have built-in features for protection,
and are there any challenges with the current such as Oracle RMAN, but these can be very expensive
method? licenses and may include performance and feature
limitations.
Are backups, secondary copies, or standby Does the customer use their secondary data for other
servers used in any operational tasks? purposes than protection, or would they like to?
For example, refreshes.
Are any native tools used for protection In the case of Oracle, RMAN may be used to protect
and/or replication? databases. Unfortunately, it only provides a mirror of the
data. When combined with ONTAP secondary storage,
Snapshot copies can be scheduled, providing an
incremental-forever backup environment, which is
efficient and powerful.

4 Data protection conversation guide

Data center manager

Discovery questions Why this is relevant

Do you have any constraints in space, power, Physical limitations can impact how and where the
or cooling? data is protected.

Do you have a cloud mandate? It’s important to understand what this means. For some
organizations, a mandate means doing something as
simple as putting backups in the cloud, or it could mean
moving applications to the cloud.

Are you considering site consolidations? Many organizations are looking to reduce data centers
to focus on their core business. Their strategy will highly
influence where the data is stored and protected.

What are your requirements for availability, How is the physical environment related to the logical
accuracy (lack of corruption), and so on? environment?
What is your tolerance for data loss?

Security and regulatory team

Discovery questions Why this is relevant

Are you under any sort of regulatory restrictions? Regulatory restrictions impact how data is stored, where
it is stored, and for how long. Technologies like NetApp
Cloud Data Sense can help classify and categorize
data for these purposes. Features like SnapLock when
combined with SnapMirror® software can help manage
data retention.
Do you have any other security controls in place? Regardless of legal or regulatory requirements,
organizations must ensure that their critical business
information is kept safe on many levels, both internal
and external. There are a multitude of products, services,
and strategies on the market today to harden and
secure environments. As a result of this proliferation,
there is potential for feature overlap—or even worse, a
lack of interoperability that creates gaps in protection.
Understanding what security controls are in place, in
conjunction with documented requirements, helps to
position a well-rounded NetApp solution while taking into
account what is already in place.

Copy control (regulatory). How many copies do Organizations have internal policies that determine the
you really need? number of copies they need to keep. This number may
be influenced by government regulations based on
industry (for example, HIPAA), which may determine the
requirements of the organization to store copies of data.
Understanding the number of copies required is essential
to sizing the right solution.

5 Data protection conversation guide

Storage, VMs, infrastructure, backup admin

Discovery questions Why this is relevant

Are there any current challenges around data Does the customer have any particular challenges they
availability and protection? How is your data want to address with new investment, such as reducing
currently protected? backup windows, moving backup to cloud, reducing
• Replication strategies data center sites, improving disaster recovery, moving
• Backup strategies applications to the cloud from on premises, and so on?
• DR strategies
• Availability strategies

Is any data loss acceptable? Data loss refers to the recovery point objective (RPO).
This is essentially the amount of time and therefore the
change in the data between backups or Snapshot copies.
Zero RPO requires synchronous replication of data.
How much recovery time is acceptable? The recovery time objective (RTO) indicates whether a
customer is looking at an HA system (like MetroCluster),
asynchronous DR, or backup. Backup usually takes
longer to restore data, but it is the most cost effective.

Where do you host your data and applications? Where applications and the protection storage are
Distance between sites, how many sites, and located impacts the solution options. Due to the laws
so on. of physics, data can travel only so fast over a wire. A
• Do you have a mandate to consolidate or synchronous replication solution has a distance limitation
reduce data center locations? to ensure adequate application performance.
• Move to cloud?

Goals for your organization or project? Timeframe? Modernizing? Refreshing?

Conclusion About NetApp

The opportunities to engage in data protection In a world full of generalists, NetApp is a specialist.
conversations are plentiful, and the conversations We’re focused on one thing, helping your business
are typically welcome if you can solve the customer’s get the most out of your data. NetApp brings the
problems. And NetApp can. NetApp ONTAP native enterprise-grade data services you rely on into the
data protection capabilities and integrated solutions cloud, and the simple flexibility of cloud into the data
can transform how our customers protect and secure center. Our industry-leading solutions work across
their data. Engage in these conversations now to diverse customer environments and the world’s
show your customers how NetApp can remove the biggest public clouds.
pain and significant cost of protecting their data.
As a cloud-led, data-centric software company,
1) Source: 451 Research, Voice of the Enterprise: Storage, Data Management and
only NetApp can help build your unique data fabric,
Disaster Recovery—Charts and Figures, 2021 simplify and connect your cloud, and securely deliver
the right data, services, and applications to the right
people—anytime, anywhere.

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