Getting started with Agentless backup

Last month we introduced one of our latest services offerings – BackupSimple – a backup service and solution that provides a managed backup platform for you to achieve all of your backup and recovery needs, whether on-premises or in the cloud, leveraging the Commvault tool and SoftwareONE’s managed services capabilities

The key premise for SoftwareONE’s BackupSimple is that you maintain control of your data and only pay for what you use. As a cloud-focused business, SoftwareONE is always looking to ensure we drive the best outcomes for our customer whether they are looking to start their cloud journey, are already consuming cloud-based services or are fully driving their business through cloud technologies. BackupSimple is the latest offering to help our customers achieve their cloud goals.

Some of the key reasons organizations move to cloud computing, particularly IaaS or PaaS, is due to the ease of deployment and the level of automation that can be achieved to help drive consistency and repetition in deployments, while improving stability and availability of applications to the end-user. Gone are the days of building golden images for your server Operating System Environment (OSE) with various agents and configuration settings predefined, that no longer align with the speed and flexibility that cloud can achieve.

Agent-less backup was created to retain the benefits of agent-based backup without the expense of per-server agents. Agent-less backup is as its name suggests, backups without the use of an agent installed onto the host server you want to back up. Some agent-based backup solutions can be weak from a security point of view, and expensive. Adding agents also increases the amount of software your business has to manage.

A key benefit for using BackupSimple is its ability to provide you with the technical capability to deliver agentless backups across all of your virtualization platforms using shared disk technology. This includes on-premises hypervisors with SAN/NAS capability or your public cloud IaaS/PaaS tenant subscriptions. BackupSimple enables tagging to automate the backup for a server at the point of build, allowing your teams to focus on the application, and not how the infrastructure and application is being protected.

Agentless data backups offer some major advantages over agent-based backups. SoftwareONE recommends its use wherever possible, and it can be especially beneficial for VM backups. Let’s take a look at some of the benefits of agentless backup, as opposed to traditional agent-based backup.

Automation and flexibility

Deploy your infrastructure through automated tools for consistency, with the confidence that all servers that are deployed will be backed up as needed without having to deploy agents or add agents manually into the backup plans.

Costs

This is a big one as more organizations turn to cloud environments. Agentless allows you to have a single agent that monitors and controls the backup of all VMs deployed without having to install an agent on each VM.

Ease of administration & control

Because agentless lets you have a single point of management across the environment, restoration of data is easier as there is a single place to monitor the data from

In-built compatibility

Because it’s agentless, BackupSimple provides the ability to restore VMs across the platform, changing their size and name as needed, giving your business the flexibility it requires to host or recover the service as needed

SoftwareONE’s BackupSimple with Commvault takes a modern approach to agentless backup allowing customers to better manage how they code, tag, allocate and apply policies across their backup needs.