Huawei Technologies (Nigeria) Limited has announced the launch of its OceanProtect Data Protection for the Nigerian market, which it says provides a series of comprehensive data protection solutions that cover disaster recovery (DR), data backups, and data archiving for the rapid growth of diversified service data and the entire data lifecycle.

“Based on the concept of ‘full DR of hot data (data that needs to be accessed frequently), quick backup and restore of warm data, and warm archiving of cold data’, OceanProtect Data Protection can provide zero service interruption, data integrity, and long-term data retention,” Mr. Ding, Director of IT Solution, Huawei Nigeria said during the launch of the solution during the Huawei IT Day in Lagos.

The growing rate of malicious attacks targeted at organisations and users’ data as well as the growing reliance of most sectors of the economy on data as more digital transformation initiatives are implemented means more emphasis needs to be placed on solutions that ai users in recovering data in the event of unplanned loss.

“As our businesses and lives become digitalized, our expectations for uninterrupted productivity are absolute, making the continuity of data services and networks increasingly important. Today, if a data center breaks down, it can have a significant impact on people’s lives, more so for the vast majority of businesses that don’t have effective data recovery (DR) systems.

“Many critical financial and telecom enterprises on whose services national economies and citizen’s livelihoods depend on, have not yet built intra-city or remote DR facilities. Furthermore, in healthcare and manufacturing, where service continuity is key to saving lives, many enterprises lack sufficient DR facilities. Even those that are constructing DR facilities frequently encounter service interruptions as they evolve. Clearly, it’s time for enterprises to increase investment in DR solutions that enable disruption-free upgrades to their productivity and service offering,” Ding said.

In 2021, it was estimated that Nigeria and two other countries were victims of over 85 million cyber attacks. Poor supporting infrastructure such as electricity and internet access, manpower and low IT skill challenges are also factors that increase the risks of data loss, corruption or destruction.

“In recent years, cyber-attacks and misoperations have caused data corruption and loss on a huge scale, whilst disaster recovery was imperative in these situations, it alone is not sufficient to effectively protect against these threats. Therefore, it’s essential to construct backup facilities. Explosive data growth means that more and more data needs to be backed up in a fixed backup window. As a result, enterprises demand faster backup speeds. The dependence of enterprise services on data makes data loss or long-term inaccessibility unacceptable and rapid recovery in the event of a crisis crucial. To enable quick backups and restoration of warm data, Huawei has launched two new industry-leading backup and recovery bandwidths under the OceanProtect series, OceanProtect X8000/X9000 Backup Storage.

“This is why Huawei promotes the full DR of hot data and the construction of DR facilities for all production systems. Only this way can we ensure reliable business continuity. Based on this idea, Huawei provides an integrated ‘active-active’ solution for SAN and NAS, which allows one system to be used for both block and file storage services commonly used in the financial, telecom, healthcare, and manufacturing industries. Both types of services can be balanced through dual data centers, improving overall performance and helping customers achieve maximum return on investment (ROI).

But some of these solutions are not “plug and play” he explained.

“High-level DR facilities are not built overnight. Long construction periods and high costs hinder DR construction and the protection of production systems. To reduce an enterprise’s initial investment and meet their evolving DR requirements, the Huawei active-active DR solution also guarantees the non-disruptive upgrade from one system to an active-active or active-passive dual-system deployment, and then to three-data-center (3DC) or even multi-DC four-copy DR solution. Facilities can be upgraded online, and the DR level increases as and when required. Customers can smoothly upgrade the DR construction level based on their budgets and requirements to achieve better protection for their production data,” Ding said.