Every month, we partner with a leading product or service provider in the industry to help IT professionals understand the solutions and providers available to them. Last month, we spoke with Assured DP about their data backup and disaster recovery services for on premise and cloud environments, as well as how their Rubrik solutions are even affordable for SMBs.

Here are our favorite excerpts from the webinar transcript - and you can watch the full webinar at the end of this post!

How Can Rubrik Help With on Premise and Cloud Data Security?

We've been working with Rubrik since the very early days, and the majority of our customers, despite all the talk of public cloud, still have workload on-premise in their legacy applications. Whether they are things that they intend to move to the cloud, things they can't move, or things they might not ever imagine moving. At the same time, almost every one of those customers is exploring public-cloud in some capacity. The “toe in the water” version is often Office 365. Next is taking non-native applications and converting them into the cloud. Lastly, there are those moving100% operations to the public cloud. Across all groups, we see a lot of SaaS adoption. And we treat that the same way, because if you think about, where are public clouds? They sit in physical data centers, and guess what else is in those physical data centers? It is the cloud infrastructure for SaaS products like Salesforce. And so, cloud is almost always a relevant component of the conversation.

We also encounter a lot of customers that are running multiple data centers. They might not necessarily have production workloads in multiple locations, but in some instances, they have two locations with the second location only there for the purposes of disaster recovery and business continuity. That third party data center could be anything, it could be another site that you own, it could be colocation that you keep across the country or across town. For the purposes of the rest of this conversation, that third party data center, let’s assume is Assured DP. So we exist to be that additional location for the purposes of data, redundancy, and business continuity and we chose very carefully, where we place that with our global footprint.

Why Equinix Data Centers?

We adopted the Equinix footprint of data centers for two primary reasons. One, Equinix is synonymous with security. They have a global standard, all of their data centers support an active and always updated SOC1 and SOC2 certifications. The Equinix security posture, along with our certifications, ISO 9000 27001, and now SOC2, also put us in a very unique position to help customers where compliance is a concern when it comes to selecting third party support and hosting partners for data backup and disaster recovery. The second piece of importance for Equinix is connectivity to that public cloud, you see how this now kind of creates itself in a triangle. And the third leg of that triangle is your ability to access the public cloud, from those third party data centers. And that is really the second reason we chose Equinix. They're the gold standard for a lot of the public cloud providers. Today, most of the public clouds and SaaS providers that you might be considering, or currently using today, have endpoints that exist inside of the Equinix family. Equinix has gone to the step of creating something they call the Equinix Cloud Exchange, which is a secure, high speed, low latency, web of connectivity that ties all of their facilities together. It's a layer two connection, it's off internet, and we live on that connection in their marketplace. That gives you the ability to step inside of the Equinix facility, and then gives you the ability to hop on the cloud exchange, which gives you yet another connection to the public cloud.

Why Use Rubrik for Disaster Recovery Services?

The reason that we decided almost five, nearly six, years ago to partner with Rubrik and to partner with them exclusively, was because of their vision around not only data protection and secure data recovery, but also helping customers extract more value from their data that they protect. Rubrik was built to exist in all three corners of this triangle. So whether it's on your premise, in a secondary data center that may or may not be ours, or in the public cloud, Rubrik has the ability to be there to help you along that journey. One of the calling cards of Rubrik is its ability to do something called live mounting, which allows you to launch directly from the Rubrik technology, an instance of your VMWare. They also help you do VMWare conversion. There was great forethought into the construction of Rubrik as it relates to public cloud and customers all along that journey. And that's a differentiator of theirs, versus the traditional tools that we find that were oftentimes created before the three main drivers that we live in today. And those three main drivers are our virtualization, public cloud, and scale out architecture.

Why Not Buy From Rubrik Directly?

If there's anybody on the webinar that has started to investigate Rubrik, you’ll see it’s a single tenant solution and it's aimed at the enterprise. So how do you make Rubrik multi-tenant? The answer to that is our proprietary technology, it's called ProtectView. ProtectView is an incident monitoring, consolidation and remediation tool. It has role-based access and control, which means that you can log in to ProtectView and into the UI - we make a big deal of not hiding the Rubrik UI from you. One of the selling attributes of Rubrik is that it's easy to manage. So you know, why make it harder on you by making you log in a ticket and wait for one of us to respond, when all you want to do is maybe live down a server for the purposes of test and dab. You may want to try out a new patch and see if it breaks anything before you move it into production, so we don't stand in the way in that. What ProtectView allows us to do is to deliver on that monitoring promise to you that you're now out of the business of having to pay attention to your backups. We monitor all aspects of the backup process. So every time we're communicating with the Rubrik application, we measure dialogue response time. And if that starts to get slow, we'll flag it because it's a problem. And how do we know to look for that? Well, because we're a Managed Service Provider (MSP) and we live in this world every day. And that's really what ProtectView does. It elevates you out of having to play that game of OEM product feature functionality, comparison, and instead focus on business outcomes. Instead of just buying a piece of tech, you get a business contract with delivery built-in, contractually in a service description, and service level agreements with penalties. And by doing that, we increase the value. So at the end of the day, this is a more value deliverable model as opposed to a single tenant investment in any one technology.

Is Rubrik Pricing Cost-Effective for SMBs?

And then the other final thing is that we have this ability to open up an end of the market that Rubrik typically can't go to on its own. And that's down in the SMBs. We sell by bands at our lowest tier, our lowest band of service is zero to eight terabytes. So if you're on this call, and you have five terabytes of data that you need to protect, we can drive this technology down into that that sub 10 terabyte level to make it very cost effective.

What is an Example Use Case for Rubrik at a Big Company?

You know, one of our customers is Jack Links, the guys who make beef jerky. They've got a big facility in Minneapolis. And then they have 15 remote locations, two of which are in Europe, and have GDPR implications. And so we cover all of those locations, we do all of that data backup locally, where it is nearby for rapid recovery. I mentioned Live Mount earlier, it's a really unique feature of Rubrik that allows you to launch directly from the Rubrik appliance, which means your recovery time objectives, which used to be measured in gigabytes, or terabytes per hours or days, is now near instant. Because you can just immediately recover and launch that back into your hypervisor host and use it.

How Does the Data Replication Work?

Rubrik replication is very efficient. It's incremental forever. So once you've captured the initial seed, you're only transmitting the bits of data that have changed, which means it's not a heavy impact on your internet connectivity. And then the other cool thing is that once you've got Rubrik data that was backed up on your premise, now over in a second facility, you then have the same Rubrik capabilities, primarily Live Mount, which is what introduces disaster recovery. So if you said, I want data backed up locally on an appliance. And then I want to archive to AWS, I want to leverage archive. And what’s different than replication archive is Rubrik’s ability to write to either over the Internet or to any S3 target, or if you're on an internal network, you can also write to other NFS targets. But you might just say, look, I want Rubrik on-premise and I want to archive to the cloud, and that is totally doable with our solution. If you want to introduce replication, you can do that. If you want to introduce disaster recovery, you just continue to add on.

How Does Assured DP’s Rubrik Pricing Work?

So if you said I just want Rubrik on premise - I want to be able to archive to my S3 account and AWS, that's tier one. Everything is included. There's no hidden charges. From the perspective of our delivery model, it's all inclusive. Then if you decide to explore tier two, say you want to introduce second site replication to introduce some redundancy, it’s tier two pricing and everything is included. And then if you want it to move up to disaster recovery as a service, that's tier three, a price increase, but everything’s included. For example, if you have an incident where your primary site for whatever reason becomes unavailable, and you need to recover your virtual machines in our environment in tier two, you can do that. That's what we call business continuity. However, many of our customers want something more than that, they want hands-on help. And that's where tier three comes in, introducing disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS).

How Do You Test Disaster Recovery Capabilities?

That’s where our two disaster recovery drills per year come in. And for a period of up to six days, we don't charge you for the consumption of resources - because if you don't drill and test disaster recovery, it won't work when the chips are down. So for a period of up to six days, twice a year, we allow you to spin up your VMs in our environment and keep everything in a bubble, we don't have to do IP changes, and we give you access to that bubble. And you can use it to performance-test to your heart's content. Once those drills are over, you get two pieces of documentation. One, you get a certificate of completion that you can use internally or for third party validation if you've got an outside audit function that needs you to demonstrate that you've been able to do disaster recovery. And two, there is a much more detailed report that is generated. Because as we know, it is dynamic, it never is static, it changes all the time. And so there are always changes to the runbook that occur as a result of this disaster recovery drills. And so that is memorialized as well.

Why Shouldn’t Disaster Recovery Services Be Ignored?

I think we all know that just because data is in the cloud doesn't mean it's protected. And as you move data to Amazon Web services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform (GCP) and up into SaaS applications, you are stillon the hook to provide third party protection to anyone with data in those resources. Rubrik, and Assured DP, have great capability to help you protect that data.

Want to learn more about Rubrik and Assured DP’s DRaaS options? Contact us today, we’d be happy to coordinate an introduction and quotes at no cost.

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