How Mainframe Disaster Recovery and backup services reduces TCO and increases efficiency

How Mainframe Disaster Recovery and backup services reduces TCO and increases efficiency When a company has a major outage due to a natural disaster, a cybercrime, or human error, advanced planning could be the key between recovery and tragedy. Only three out of ten organizations were found to be prepared to recover their operations in the case of a disaster.

There's a lot more to mainframe backup and disaster recovery than complete catastrophes. One can ensure minimum downtime during the frequent interruptions and costly outages by before-hand strategic planning. The substantial expenses connected with these "minor" uptime concerns were exposed in a recent ITIC survey: ● 98% of organizations said that one hour of downtime costs more than $100,000 ● 86% indicated that an hour of downtime costs their business over $300,000 ● 34% reported that one hour of downtime costs their firms $1–5 million Backup and disaster recovery are essential for your business. If retrieving lost data after an error takes hours, your staff or partners may be unable to finish business-critical tasks that depend on your technologies. And if it takes days to get your firm back online after a crisis, you risk losing consumers for good. Investments in backup and disaster recovery are fully justifiable, considering the length of time and revenue you could lose in both scenarios. Because of the high expenses, mainframe managers must be prepared to handle the dual challenges of limiting downtime while also lowering backup and archiving costs. Unfortunately, traditional mainframe backup and archive data management methods make this difficult. Handling massive amounts of data in a way that allows for efficient recovery while staying under budget is difficult, but not impossible. Leaders of mainframes have various tools at their disposal right now to cut costs and improve recovery efficiency, as well as new cloud data management for mainframe alternatives.

Lowering Mainframe Backup Expense Mainframe data management can suffer direct or indirect costs through backup inefficiencies and archive processes. Which can sometimes go undetected and can add the cost without providing or delivering the additional value. Below mentioned are the few key points that will help to decrease the (TCO) total cost of operation without any need for paramount-scale changes. This will help businesses and organizations to decrease the backup cost without sacrificing the recovery requirements.

Incremental backup: Reducing backups to data sets that have altered since the last backup saves time and cost over backing up all data sets every time.

Deduplication: If your target storage system allows it, duplicate copies of data should be removed.

This will clear up a lot of storage space by deleting repetitive data.

Compression: Reduce the number of stored data sets before sending them over the network to save money. Compression must be reliable and effective. This saves money in two ways: first, by lowering

the target storage's capacity, and second, by lowering the amount of cloud provider network bandwidth consumed.

Leveraging commodity storage: Data is written serially with legacy tape and VTL tools, producing performance constraints. They're also costly to keep up. You require a method for discreetly transferring mainframe data to any cloud or on-premise storage system. This will break vendor lockin and allow users to take advantage of pay-as-you-go cloud storage rather than stockpiling tapes and VTLs. By needing separate encryption software and limiting the option of tiered long-term storage in the cloud, legacy mainframe backup and archive data utilities indirectly contribute to the TCO of data management. For instance, bank data regulatory requirements mandate the storage of massive amounts of records, the vast majority of which will never be accessible. Investing the very same cost for holding this data as you do for hot data raises backup expenses unnecessarily. As explained here, choosing the correct storage for this type of data can have a big impact on backup expenses.

Enhancing Recovery Performance The efficiency of a company's recovery procedure is determined by how they address the backup stage. Because unplanned downtime is so costly, and potential non-compliance costs are so significant, all options for preventing it should be explored. Several factors can help you recover more quickly: Availability & Replication: It may be recovered from anywhere using cloud storage, and data can even be duplicated to a different location for disaster recovery (both cloud and on-prem).

Write Once, Read Many (WORM) storage: This protects you from erasure and/or interference, as well as ransom attacks.

Immutable backups: Back up data to the cloud so that you have an irreversible backup keeping your data accessible as soon as your system is operational, eliminating the requirement for the dataset.

Multiple snapshots: Performing timely flash copies of volumes and datasets ensures precise configuration and allows for automated recovery.

Stand-alone restore: In the event of a cyber-attack, disaster, or malfunction, stand-alone restore provides for bare-metal recovery from tape or the cloud. Initial program load (IPL) from a cloud server can be enabled by cloud-based backup technologies for quick recovery and reduced unscheduled downtime.

End-to-end encryption: End-to-end encryption decreases the danger of malicious data corruption, which could result in logical failures and other issues, complicating and increasing the cost of recovery scenarios. Encryption is also necessary for addressing regulatory data security and privacy obligations.

IT leaders must reduce the cost of mainframe backup and recovery while boosting the efficiency of the process. Despite the difficulty, firms that systematically address the key concerns will be well on their way to boosting security and reducing downtime without incurring large expenses.

Reference: https://solutionsreview.com/backup-disaster-recovery/how-to-decrease-cost-and-increaseefficiency-of-mainframe-backup-recovery/ https://model9.io/blog/mainframe-best-practices-for-affordable-backup-and-efficient-recovery/