Data Backup and Recovery in Federal and National Research Agencies

National research agencies and laboratories are broadly working to modernize their IT infrastructure to meet the quickly arriving needs of tomorrow. Their IT centers face an ongoing challenge to adapt and improve their IT operations to remain flexible and offer the latest performance capabilities. New and different approaches to security, efficiency and performance are needed – and are indeed currently being adopted - to achieve these improvements.

Bacula anticipates that technology and innovation improvements in the research and laboratory ITC space will increase, especially in specific areas such as edge compute, container technologies and security approaches.

• Top 10 Whitepaper Highlights
  1. IT environment complexity in the research sector
  2. Technical & demanding IT environments
  3. Meeting RPO's and RTO's
  4. The need for especially high levels of security
  5. Bare metal recovery
  6. The need to de-risk implementation
  7. Hybrid cloud in the research sector
  8. Stand-alone capabilities and "air-gapping"
  9. Container technologies in the research sector
  10. How NASA benefits from Bacula
  11. Avoiding vendor lock-in

In parallel, new governance principles are being introduced into many areas of the research sector, such as automation, adaptability, promotion of transparency and inherent accountability. Correspondingly, a variety of new management styles are also seeing increased adoption. New projects that employ new methodologies are increasingly being supported by senior leaders within research organizations. This is contributing to a change in organizational culture, along with the development of new collaborative processes, technologies and tools to automate the process and to apply consistent governance across a Federal/National laboratory or research organization.

As more research and government agencies shift to using Bacula, a pattern of needs clearly emerges from these organizations, and the reasons why the shift takes place. The Bacula Systems white paper 'Data Backup and Recovery in Federal and National Research Agencies' discusses the considerations and advantages of using FIPS 140-2 compliant Bacula Enterprise as a central data backup and recovery system within research organizations, and how it can – and does - facilitate a specific, yet critical part in these organization’s enterprise-wide approach to digital modernization.