Backup and Recovery- The Hidden BPM Process

By definition, Business Process Management is a holistic management approach that promotes business effectiveness and efficiency while striving for innovation, flexibility, and integration with technology. A business process is a set of coordinated tasks and activities, conducted by both people and equipment, which will lead to accomplishing a specific organizational goal.

While business processes will vary across organizations, all organizations share one particular goal regardless of their business model or vertical market, and that is ensuring data is protected and recoverable. Every company must backup their data on a periodic basis in order to ensure that data is recoverable in multiple scenarios including accidental deletion, auditor requests, server failure or unexpected disaster.

Ensuring data is protected and recoverable is perhaps the most critical backend IT process in any organization, yet it often gets the least amount of attention particularly as it relates to BPM (and ITSM ). If BPM is truly a “process optimization process”, and no IT process can effectively work without access to its required data, then shouldn’t there be a focused methodology aimed at continuously improving the data protection process itself?

Recent surveys show that 59% of IT organizations are increasing their backup/recovery budgets. What is questionable is if this increase is truly necessary. Couldn’t significant cost savings be realized if the data protection process itself was better optimized and more effectively aligned with the needs of the business?

The answer is yes. There is ample proof that simply automating reporting on the success or failures of data protection operations can reduce administrative costs by 20-30% and help significantly improve recoverability rates. Additional process improvement, including continuous policy management, problem management and SLA management can also drive down costs and significantly improve customer satisfaction.

Without focus on improving data protection operations, organizations can waste millions of dollars on inefficient resource usage and unexpected downtime each year. In order to improve on data protection operations, organizations should treat data protection as a service, delivered to either internal or external customers, and follow a Data Protection Service Management (DPSM) model. The model outlines a multi-phased approach to assess the overall data protection delivery infrastructure, improve the ability to deliver quality data protection and recovery services, publish the results to customers and continuously advance the effectives of data protection operations while lowering costs.

With standardized policies and processes in place, storage teams will be able to effectively communicate how data is being protected and set expectations with end users on how different levels of data protection impact overall costs.  Over time, data protection process standardization and diligent policy management can significantly improve on backup SLA success, drive down costs and improve overall business efficiencies- but only if it is given the attention it deserves.

More on Backup Policy Management

Excerpts from a recent White paper:

Ensuring successful backups across the data protection environment is a goal that all IT administrators strive to achieve.  Yet most experienced administrators understand that a backup success only tells part of the story.  Take Michael, the eager backup administrator who reviews and remediates all his environments’ backups to ensure 99% success rates. When tasked with restoring the CEO’s email from a month ago, he is confident that his hard work of resolving missed and failed backups on a daily basis will ensure a quick recovery.  However, much to his dismay, he discovers that the mail server he hopes to restore had been mistakenly assigned to a legacy data retention policy which only stores one week worth of backup data.

Proactively managing and troubleshooting a backup environment entails much more than just monitoring job success and failure rates. As in the above example, monitoring success and failures can help ensure recoverability, to a point. There are many other aspects of the backup operation that must be monitored to ensure all data is recoverable.

Historical trending is critical to determine if there are intermittent failures, and can help determine if there have been significant unplanned changes in the environment. For example, a decrease in daily capacity trends could indicate that some jobs may have inadvertently been marked inactive, resulting in potentially critical data not being backed up. Monitoring media use, such as drive use over time, can expose bottlenecks caused by too many jobs being kicked off simultaneously, which in turn can cause jobs to not meet their backup window or fail completely. And of course, ensuring the right policies are in place for certain applications and data sets (such as frequency of backups and incrementals and retention rates) are critical for meeting RPOs and SLAs.

However, each of the problems above can be addressed with proper backup policy configuration. Ongoing policy review is a critical piece of a data protection service management process. Organizations need to ensure that their policies are effectively supporting the business goals of the company as it relates to recoverability, compliance, SLA adherence and capacity management.

Initially, administrative teams should evaluate the policies in place to determine their impact on operations. For example an analysis may determine:

 

• Too many jobs are started at the same time, causing bottlenecks resulting in failures.
• Retention rates are not set appropriately and therefore recovery point objectives (RPOs) cannot be met
• Too many fulls on non-critical data are wasting capacity.
• Some clients are “overprotected” (duplicate policies applied) and are wasting resources.

 

The list of potential problems goes on, but what’s most important is that each of these problems expose opportunities for process improvement and better service delivery results. An automated reporting solution that can regularly mine policy configuration provides the visibility required for customers to quickly and easily review policies and determine if changes need to be made to meet business goals. Over time, standardization and diligent policy management can significantly improve on backup SLA success, drive down costs and improve overall data protection results.

 For the full white paper go to http://www.bocada.com/products_downloads.php#WhitePapers

The Importance of Backup Policy Management for Service Delivery

The past month has just flown by, we have been so busy with product release, product planning and closing out the half that yes, I have neglected blogging. However, I am more than excited to talk about all the progress we have made, and it makes sense to start with the latest release of Bocada Enterprise announced this week. We announced in depth policy mining and reporting, which is essential for effective data protection service delivery.

Our total focus at Bocada these days is enabling Data Protection Service Management (DPSM), making sure that teams responsible for ensuring data is protected for either internal or external customers are empowered with the right information to ensure success and drive customer satisfaction. Our model outlines best practices for ensuring that success, and continuous policy monitoring and management is a critical piece of the overall process.

Every backup administrator, manager, auditor and customer needs to know that the policies in place support the data protection needs of the business. This seems completely obvious, considering every server, application, NAS or file backed up is done so based on the policy that is set on the backup server. So therefore, you need to make sure the policies support the appropriate number of fulls and incrementals, have the right retention rates set and generally support the recovery requirements for business critical data.

So you would think it would be easy then to get that information from the backup applications themselves right? Not so much. Many of our customers have either written their own scripts or manually retrieve that information on a daily basis, because the backup applications don’t actually save a historical record of policy changes. This is timely and the manual process can be problematic, particularly in large environments, simply because it is difficult to keep track thousands of polices and ensure they are consistent and correctly configured.

Granted, we are just introducing this functionality ourselves which is probably long overdue. Our focus on DPSM really brought the need for policy mining and management to the forefront, and while this capability will be an essential offering in the new UMP solution I have mentioned, we felt it was critical to provide in-depth backup policy mining to customers today in order to help drive the overall DPSM process.

The first step in the DPSM process is assessment, when you evaluate which jobs are succeeding and failing, determine the recoverability of data, evaluate capacity use and track trends to understand the health of the overall operation. The next phase is policy management, when you evaluate the policies in place to determine their impact on operations. For example you may determine:

• Too many jobs are started at the same time, causing bottlenecks resulting in failures.
• Retention rates are not set appropriately and therefore recovery point objectives (RPOs) cannot be met
• Too many fulls on non-critical data are wasting capacity.
• Some clients are “overprotected” (duplicate policies applied) and are wasting resources.

The list of potential problems goes on, but what’s most important is that each of these problems expose opportunities for process improvement and better service delivery results. The DPSM process recommends making necessary changes, setting consistent policies across specific application or client types to reduce potential errors and then continuously monitor the impact of those changes. Overtime, standardization and diligent policy management can significantly improve on SLA success, drive down costs and improve overall operations.

We are very excited to offer policy mining and reporting for IBM TSM and Symantec NetBackup in our latest release to help our customers better meet their backup and recovery goals.

 For more information on Bocada Enterprise 5.4 and the new policy features go to http://www.bocada.com/resources_downloads.php

 

Cheers

 

Nancy Hurley

With Email Down- thinking of Data Protection Management

I am experiencing email withdrawal today, and I am realizing the extent of addiction I actually have to my email. We are moving our corporate offices today, and so we have planned a day of downtime for our email servers. We’ve been planning this for months, so it’s not as though I wasn’t prepared, but still I am just cringing at the thought of not being able to get my email until maybe tomorrow. What makes my addiction even more apparent… I am on a cross country plane trip as I write this, so I couldn’t get my email anyway, but I am freaking out because I know when I land I won’t be able to turn on the blackberry and read my emails. What could I be missing??!! I need help.

 And that leads me to think about how people react to the more critical issue of unplanned downtime for email. A server crash could be devastating to a business, and worse not being able to recover emails because the server wasn’t backed up appropriately could result in some serious meltdowns for those affected (I know I would probably need some type of therapy if it happened to us). But, of course we manage our backups with our own software, and therefore we know if we are at risk of not being able to recover our data seeing we are alerted to any failed backup activity. Now I of course recommend use of our software to everyone, but today I am going to talk about another vendor’s software, Microsoft’s Data Protection Manager.

 An upcoming webinar we are doing with Microsoft on June 10th(How to Manage Microsoft System Center Data Protection Manager 2007 in Large Enterprises,) reminded me that I have yet to talk about our partnership with Microsoft here, which is surprising as the product we have developed to manage their data protection offering was really the launch of our foray into active management (as opposed to strictly reporting). Our Centralized Manager for Microsoft DPM 2007 solution provides command and control functionality for multiple DPM servers (without our product a user would need to write scripts to manage the servers via SCOM…possible but not ideal).

 Obviously when you think email, most of us think Exchange, and thus Microsoft. But not too many people automatically think “I should protect my Exchange environment with MSFT DPM”. My thought is maybe they should. I realize they got off to a bit of a rocky start with DPM, the initial version had no application integration, but bottom line is Microsoft is in the data protection space in order to be the best at protecting Microsoft applications. And they have a pretty interesting product that any MSFT shop should take a look at.

 Bocada provides management and reporting for DPM 2007, and since we starting working with the product (in 2007) we have become extremely familiar with the different approach to data protection or more importantly recovery. First, setting up “data protection groups” (policies/schedules) is very easy particularly with our Centralized Manager if you have multiple servers. Just a few steps and the frequency of synchronizations (incrementals), fulls, and all retention rates both short term and long term are set up in a few quick steps. DPM is tightly integrated with MSFT applications, backing up only byte level changes and saving to disk or tape (for example, DPM synchronizes Exchange transaction logs and uses VSS to determine only those blocks that have changed). If users choose to do synchronizations every 15 min they obviously get granular recovery points, and DPM helps determine the “best” recovery point. End users can do their own recoveries (if you want to give them that control).

 A senior architect at one of our customers (who used another vendors backup solutions) said “DPM is the first data protection solution that really allows the business owner to easily and effectively manage their data protection requirements- and that’s how I want to have our business managed.” Considering the price point is low, really low for MSFT customers with enterprise agreements, I can’t see why users wouldn’t at least take a look at DPM to see how they could be managing their environment with an application focus (instead of a “data” focus). And of course if you do take a look, check out our product that helps manage many servers in your environment- this has been a great partnership for us and hopefully would be for you too.

Sign up for the Microsoft Technet webinar June 10^th: Managing DPM in Large Scale Deployments to learn more about Bocada Centralized Manager  http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/WebCastEventDetails.aspx?EventID=1032412446&EventCategory=4&culture=en-US&CountryCode=US

No Slow Down for Backup Reporting Business

I realize it has been a long time since I have posted to this blog, and I would love to say it’s because I have been on vacation for a month but that’s not the case. While I did take a week vacation between posts the truth is we at Bocada have been extremely busy. Which in this economy, is not just encouraging, but also a testament to the importance of data protection management and effective service delivery management.

 

Rather than witnessing a downturn in business, we are seeing a number of companies putting initiatives in place aimed at driving efficiencies across their data protection infrastructures and increasing customer communication regarding SLAs and cost of support. Those initiatives are driving the requirements for comprehensive information about data protection activities across the enterprise infrastructure as well as the ability to publish SLA and chargeback information to internal or external customers.

 

This of course is what Bocada focuses on delivering, and so of course we are excited about new and installed base customers buying our product, but what is more encouraging is that we are finding many companies are now aligning their strategic data protection goals with the Data Protection Service Management model Bocada developed to help organizations utilize our solution to achieve operational excellence.  .

 

In the past, customers may have only thought of backup reporting as an administrative tool used for troubleshooting. However now with more focus on ITSM across enterprise organizations, customers are realizing the information delivered by a data protection management/backup reporting solution can help deliver on strategic business initiatives. Customers may not say “we have a DPSM initiative”, at least not initially, but what we are hearing quite a bit of are statements such as:

 

• There is a global initiative across (the bank, retail org etc) to standardize on backup service delivery
• There is a requirement to create a service catalog for backup and recovery
• We need to find a way to automatically publish SLA reports out to management and/or customers
• We need to standardize on how we charge for backup services

 

What is different about these statements vs the customer conversations we have had in the past? These requirements are business related. In order to become more of a service oriented organization IT organizations need management solutions that can deliver against business goals.

 

Bocada is uniquely positioned in the market to provide the solution for delivering on DPSM. The model we developed was created with customers who were way in front of this trend and used our solution to help create and deliver against SLAs, reduce risk and achieve operational excellence. More importantly, our entire roadmap is focused on enhancing our existing solutions to quickly, easily and automatically deliver against the DPSM model.

 

For more information on the DPSM model (formerly the Bocada Path to Excellence) go to http://www.bocada.com/dpsm.php

 

For information on the product and  roadmap drop us a line at sales@bocada.com

The Importance of SLAs- for Backup and Everything Else

I wanted to talk today about Service Level Agreements and the importance of everyone agreeing on the terms of the SLA. It’s been a while since I’ve posted, the end of the quarter was a bit hectic and time seems to have gotten away from me. However another reason I have been delayed in posting is due to being very sick with what may very well be pneumonia for the second time this year. I don’t like being sick, no one does- I will admit it makes me grumpy (the steroids they have given me to fight off the infection probably don’t help). My most recent experience with the doctors office however made me very grumpy, and really made me think about the larger concept of service offerings, and SLAs.

 

The concept of the SLA is that we (me the customer you the provider) have agreed that when I sign up for a service, I should have certain expectations about the delivery of that service including the quality and timeliness of the service offered. At Bocada, our philosophy is that backup is a service offered to clients, either internal or external, and we encourage all our customers to use our product in order to more effectively deliver that service. We have developed a model to help our users step through the process of first assessing what they truly can offer to customers (for example backup success rates of 90%, recovery times of 1 hour etc), and then create SLAs that they can present to clients. The best way to create a solid relationship with those clients is to set expectations appropriately, agree to the terms together, and then report out on the adherence to those terms. The SLA is a mutual agreement that avoids finger pointing while also holding all parties accountable. They work to keep customers of the service happy, and for the service providers to monitor their own levels of success.

 

The problem that we witness however is that in many cases SLAs are either a) implied, b) outdated or c) non-existent. The implied SLA can be the most dangerous to the provider customer relationship, if one party (the customer) believes the service should be at one level and has certain expectations, and the deliverer has a different idea of parameters of delivery, you are set up for a significant customer satisfaction issue.

 

Which brings me back to my doctor visit. This is not “a” doctor visit. The was a trip to a pulmonary specialist to try to diagnose what ails me after four trips to urgent care, one trip to the emergency room and one overnight stay in the hospital. Had I not had the appointment with him that morning, I probably would have had my husband take me to the ER again as I was having problems getting enough air. When I saw the specialist, he order a battery of tests, some of which I could do at the clinic, some I had to do at a hospital. I needed to talk with “the scheduler” for the hospital tests. I waited at her desk for 15 min, she did not return. The nurse assured me she would have the “scheduler” call as soon as she got back to her desk. I will make a long story short. She didn’t call, not that day, not the next. I called twice, thinking that when a pulmonary specialist requests that I get a “breathing test” and a CT scan- it’s important. Apparently “the scheduler” didn’t think it was that big of a deal. She called 3 days later, and had me scheduled for tests two weeks from now. Another long story short- I had the tests run today.

 

As I was stewing about the lack of response to what I deemed an urgent situation, I thought about SLAs. The scheduler and I, and by default the doctor and I, had very different ideas about how important the tests were. To me, they were critical. To her just another test. I wanted to cite an SLA- “person having difficulty breathing gets immediate testing scheduled”. That SLA does not exist. I would think it was implied, but I guess not. And based on this, after all is said and done, I will change doctors once I get the diagnosis, because I don’t want to deal with any service provider that doesn’t think my health is as important as I believe it to be.

 

We are seeing a significant uptake in outsourced backup service offerings in the market, and many of our users are providing those services. Our Data Protection Service Management model dedicates an entire “phase” to the SLA, including the assessment of capabilities, the documentation of the SLA levels and the requirement to agree to the SLA, not just assume an agreement. Bocada offers SLA reports out of the box (with parameters/measures that can be set by users), and we have delivered multiple customized SLA reports as no two organizations will have exactly the same SLA requirements. We are continuing to enhance our SLA report offerings and will have some new reports in releases this year. The important thing is however that we encourage everyone to put backup and recovery SLAs in place with their customers. That way, when the CEO wants their email from a month ago recovered within a specific period of time, the provider can refer to the SLA in order to determine exactly what is expected of them and how they can meet or beat expectations.

 

In this economy, customer satisfaction is crucial to maintaining your revenue stream (or to internal service providers, perhaps your job). Making sure everyone is on the same page and everyone agrees to the SLA will help ensure your customers are happy and will continue to be your customers. Customers have choices, just as I have a choice of doctors, and you don’t want to give them any reason to choose another provider. The SLA is a key tool to maintain customer satisfaction.

 

Cheers

Nancy Hurley

Bocada CEO

Backup Vendor Reporting- Bring it On

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A while ago I wrote about the fact that at Bocada, we welcome the idea of the backup vendors adding more reporting functionality into their applications. When Bocada originally pioneered the heterogeneous backup reporting market, we anticipated that the leading backup vendors would eventually be enhancing the reporting functionality in their applications based on customer demand. And while many pundits might believe we would consider the idea of Symantec, IBM and others adding reporting to be a death knell for our products, that’s not really the case.

 

Instead, we see this as an opportunity for Bocada to more rapidly move toward delivering on our Unified Management Platform, a solution that enables effective data protection service delivery. This is not a major shift from our focus today, our goal has always been to help customers more effectively manage data protection operations. However, if we do not have to focus entirely on filling in for the lack of reporting that should be embedded in the backup applications we can concentrate more on the delivery methodology of the information that enables operational excellence.

 

From Bocada’s viewpoint, embedded reporting is a complementary solution, and you can hear more about why next Tuesday, March 31^st when we jointly host a webinar with the IBM TSM product team. TSM reporting is a very big business for us, on of our largest customers is an MSP that serves hundreds of TSM customers, and our largest enterprise customers tend to be very TSM centric. Over the eight years that we have provided TSM reporting, we have developed a significant knowledge base of the requirements of TSM reporting (and luckily pulled a few of our former TSM clients in as employees to help us understand customer requirements from a real end user perspective).

 

Bocada is also a Tivoli Ready Partner, meaning we can work closely with IBM marketing and the TSM product team if the occasion calls- and with the introduction of reporting functionality in TSM 6.1, we wanted to make sure that both teams could articulate the benefits of the free reporting offered by IBM vs the reporting offered by Bocada. Both teams consider the reports complementary. Yes, there are absolutely some overlapping reports, and IBM offers a few we don’t (although we could “ingest” those into our console), but for the most part IBM isn’t trying to be a reporting company, they are adding value to their product. So they are not trying to support other competitors solutions (which is refreshing, because lets face it, as much as any backup vendor may say they provide reports for other backup applications, how can the user trust that they don’t have a vested interest in making their product look better than the others?), and they are not trying to drive revenue from reporting per se- the core focus is enhancing TSM.

 

And we think that is great. TSM 6.1 has a lot of new features, free reporting being one of many. The team isn’t interested in trying to take over our business (well at least that’s not the impression I get), but wants to cooperate with any vendor that is also helping to add value to a TSM implementation. Bocada offers a lot of great reporting functionality for TSM and a number of other applications, and we believe that by using these products together customers can enhance the delivery of data protection services in their organizations.

 

If you are interested in hearing more about TSM 6.1 reporting and Bocada Enterprise please sign up for the webinar on March 31^st. If you miss it we will be running it on SearchStorage for 3 months so please take a look and let us know what you think.

 

Register at:

https://events.webdialogs.com/portal/wipevents/register.php?id=9b90bfc8b0&l=en-US

 

 

Cheers

 

Nancy Hurley

CEO

Bocada

Announcing Bocada Customer Focus Group- Social Media and Backup Reporting

It is somewhat ironic that I have spent my entire career in the hi-tech industry, yet I tend to be rather reluctant to adopt new technologies/gadgets. It’s probably because the majority of my days are spent talking about, selling, implementing and advancing technology for my job… I would rather remove myself from the world of hi-tech in off hours. I only got an I-Pod because it was a gift, people have made fun of my outdated cell phones, we just recently got the DVR package with our cable (no flat screen TV either) and I pretty much refused to get on the social media bandwagon.

 

Once a week one friend or another would ask me why I wasn’t on Facebook- and all I could think is- “isn’t that for teenagers”? A friend invited me onto Twitter, and when I realized he would update me and the rest of the world about his outings to the pool with his 3 year old I thought- why would I want to participate in this?

 

So it may be very surprising that I have been pretty adamant about Bocada using social media, in particular Facebook and Twitter, to reach out to our customer base. The bottom line is I am a convert, I realized that FB in particular was a great way to stay up to speed with events and comings and goings in friends lives. I felt as though I was finally back in touch with a world of people I had lost contact with due to my crazy schedule and lack of social manners (like picking up the phone). And as it was so easy to check in, so easy to stay up to speed, to know what was happening….I realized we finally found the conduit for the customer focus group our company had wanted to create for so long.

 

So I am announcing the launch of the Bocada Customer Focus Group on Facebook. Since I started at Bocada (in a different role) we have been talking about organizing a customer focus group for the purpose of getting feedback on trends in the data protection industry, customer requirements for backup reporting and data protection management and sharing our roadmap plans to make sure we were on track with customer requirements. In addition, we wanted to create a forum for our customers to share best practices in data protection service delivery, helping newer customers realize the full potential of the Bocada Enterprise solution. The problem was, how do we get everyone together in one location? How do we invite everyone to ensure we aren’t always just talking to the same customers and not hearing everyone’s inputs? We knew we needed to go “virtual”- but how?

 

Social Media is the answer, and we are very excited about the prospects of having an active customer discussion forum through the focus group we have set up. The Bocada Customer Focus Group is open to active customers will cover the following topics:

 

• Information on Bocada Enterprise, Bocada Centralized Manager and Bocada Unified Management Platform releases, updates and roadmaps
• Discussion topics such as best practices and user experiences
• Upcoming events (such as the Beyond Backup Reporting webinar we will be hosting along with IBM TSM product team on March 31^st)

 

As we move ahead, we will also be setting up a Bocada Twitter account for more frequent updates (that will most likely direct people to the focus group site for more detail).  We sincerely believe these forums will enable us as an organization to drive stronger relationships with all our users as we encourage everyone who interacts with Bocada solutions to participate. So if you haven’t already- go ahead and get on Facebook, join the Bocada Customer Focus Group and let us hear from you!

 

For more information go to www.bocada.com or contact Ryan Finnamore at ryanf@bocada.com

 

Cheers

 

Nancy Hurley

CEO

Bocada

Backup Reporting for ANY Backup Application

 

One of the most difficult propositions for any vendor in the enterprise reporting and management market is being able to support all of the applications your customers and prospects have in house. In Bocada’s case (in the Data Protection Management category), we support a pretty good sample of the leading backup applications and a few snapshot and de-dupe apps, but we always struggle with determining what application we should support next. (And our competitors have the same problem- just how many applications can you truly support?)

 

Last week, we announced a solution to solve that problem, and now our Bocada Enterprise product can truly report on ANY data protection application. (Yes there is a small caveat I will mention shortly).

 

With our Bocada Enterprise 5.3 solution, we offer full reporting support for TSM, NBU, Backup Exec, PureDisk, Networker, Microsoft DPM, CA BrightStor, HP DataProtector, CommVault and ACSLS. In order to provide in-depth reporting on these applications we query the backup servers directly, and depending on the applications gather information from log files, APIs etc. As you might imagine, in order to provide the full boat of 20+ standard reports and the ability to create just about any other kind of report via SQL queries there is a good deal of development work involved. Which is why, when we are planning our roadmaps and try to determine what is the next application to support we need to look at a number of factors- most importantly market demand.

 

And that can be an issue. We see a lot of demand for Avamar. But then again, SnapVault is big too. And as we do a great deal of repeat business with the installed base, we have to consider some of their requests, like the ability to support desktop applications, or SQL backups. Our biggest customer is an MSP that uses our products to assist in the delivery of backup services to clients. One of their clients has something on the order of 300 different backup/data protection applications across its different entities. Satisfying everyone can be a real challenge.

 

However that’s why I love my team-because they figured out how to support any data protection application with a new plug-in we call the Generic Application Plug-in (GAP). Working with our customers they found that consolidating the data on the activity from multiple backup applications (legacy, desktop, emerging vendor) into a central location was the top priority, and that having a subset of the extensive reporting satisfy their requirements.

 

Thus we developed the GAP solution. The Generic Backup Application Plug-in for Bocada Enterprise enables data collection from any backup application that allows job information to be extracted to a .csv file (the caveat- but most all support this feature)..

The GAP will interrogate the .csv file on a scheduled basis (similar to traditional plug-ins) and insert new job information into the Bocada Enterprise database tables. 

Once the backup activity information has been imported to the Bocada Enterprise database, users can create and view many of the popular reports included with Bocada Enterprise including:

·        Success/Failure

·        Historical Trending

·        SLA

·        Billing and Chargeback Reports. 

 

Additional Bocada Enterprise functionality can also be leveraged on this data including the ability to create zones, automatically publish reports to users and schedule updates through the Bocada Enterprise Administrative Console.

 

We’re pretty excited about this new plug-in, and so are our customers. Just about every one of them that we have talked to has an application or two they want supported. And while this is obviously great for installed base users, it can work for any organization that wants to better automate reporting or get consolidated, graphical reporting for whatever application they have in house without the hassle of installing agents (that may not even exist).

 

If you are interested in more information see our press release or contact us at sales@bocada.com

 

Press Release: http://www.bocada.com/news_press_releases-09-02-23.php

 

www.bocada.com

 

Nancy Hurley

CEO

Bocada

 

 

 

Who Benefits from Backup Reporting?

For those reading this blog or keeping up with our sales team, you know we are currently working on revamping our product line and delivering a significant upgrade of our current reporting and management products into a Unified Management Platform that will deliver much more than backup reporting. Our goal is to help organizations deliver data protection services by leveraging a modular, fully integrated combination of backup reporting, policy mining, and active management to improve processes, automate and streamline administrative tasks, and enhance outbound communication with customers.

 

Part of this strategy involves making sure customers can easily understand how this type of solution benefits multiple audiences in an organization and improves the bottom line from a cost perspective. On the positive side, we know from feedback from our installed base that our current products benefit many different users including backup administrators, backup and storage managers, IT directors, line of business managers, financial and regulatory auditors ,account managers (in the case of service providers) and end users.

 

On the not so bright side- people hear “backup reporting” and think “administrative tool”.

 

In order to ensure the new platform and GUI will immediately demonstrate value to multiple users we first took a look at how customers use the product today so we understood the goals of the primary and secondary users when utilizing our product. We have hundreds of end user customers, and some very large MSPs that use our solutions to deliver services to hundreds of additional customers, and throughout all there tend to be very common traits among users. We found a number “roles” benefited from reporting in one way or another, and we initially categorized them into “users” and “consumers”.

 

Users are those that are hands on with Bocada Enterprise that have access to the administrative console. In this group there are “casual users” and “power users”, both groups utilize the solution to view the status of backup operations across the enterprise, quickly troubleshoot problems, and publish results out to the “consumers” (managers or end users) The power user goes beyond standard tasks and analyzes the results in order to make improvements in processes to reduce failures and streamline operations. These folks are often backup administrators or backup/storage managers.

 

This group benefits when the time it takes to perform administrative tasks is significantly reduced and by getting positive visibility when reports are published. (We also know of plenty of power users that have been promoted because they effectively used Bocada Enterprise to help streamline operations and show the results to management). The business benefits from reduced administrative costs and process improvements that ensure data is recoverable.

 

Those are the obvious users of a product like ours, but what may not be as obvious are the benefits to the “consumer”, and how having a happy “consumer” can benefit the business. A “consumer” may be a manager (IT, LOB or C-level), an end user (internal or external), an account manager (for MSPs) or an auditor. These people want to see the results: What is the backup success rate? Are we meeting SLAs? Am I getting the service I am being charged for? Is data protected according to regulatory requirements?

 

The Bocada Enterprise “user” is responsible for delivering these reports. But the reactions of the “consumer” to the results are extremely important, particularly if that consumer is an end user expecting SLA adherence or questioning if they are being charged appropriately, or an auditor determining if your organization is in compliance. The immediate availability and accuracy of the reports can make or break a business deal or an audit. The flexibility, presentation, historical tracking capability and detail of these reports have proven critical for service delivery and successful audits.

 

In the end, we realize we have multiple audiences, and look forward to satisfying each with an even more advanced solution and user friendly GUI when BE 6.0 is released. In the meantime, as there will be an easy upgrade path (same backend), if your organization has not yet considered backup reporting now is a good time to take a look- today a product can only be justified when it benefits multiple users across the enterprise, helps reduce costs and helps derive greater business value from the existing IT infrastructure- which backup reporting (with Bocada Enterprise) can certainly deliver.

 

Thanks for reading!

 

Nancy Hurley

CEO

Bocada