Enterprise technology vendors bombard IT leaders everywhere with messaging that emphasizes the value or added value that their solutions provide. However, value is an open-ended term, and as a consequence, eventually loses its effectiveness.

On the other hand, measured value is a whole other matter. The ability to assign a quantitative value to a respective solution allows for more informed decision making. That’s why Juniper Networks commissioned to conduct a Total Economic Impact (TEI) study to examine the potential return on investment (ROI) that an organization might realize from a Juniper Apstra deployment.

Juniper Apstra is an intent-based networking (IBN) software-based solution that automates and validates everyday processes that make up the design, deployment, and operational stages of a large data center. The stages are often referred to as Day 0 through Day 2+. While it certainly works with other Juniper Network switches and products, it is vendor agnostic, thus providing deployment and management agility for those that utilize it.

In its study, Forrester interviewed four separate enterprises and then aggregated the collected data into a single composite organization. This organization utilized two major production centers, employed 7,500 people, and earned $3 billion in annual revenue. Prior to their Juniper Apstra implementations, all four organizations struggled with the typical challenges faced by many enterprises today:

• Inefficient design processes
• Overreliance on manual configuration tasks
• Endless event tracking
• Perpetual system updates that absorbed too much time away from understaffed IT teams

Day 0: Design Cost Savings

Time is money, especially when quantifying the time spent for an elongated IT project. The Forrester study showed that Juniper Apstra reduced the number of FTE hours required in the design phase of a new data center by 60%. By shrinking requirement scoping and design time, Forrester was able to quantify a savings of $73,000 within the first two years. Much of these savings were due to the preconfigured templates that designers can utilize without any preparation on their part. After all, you don’t want your high-priced engineers creating their own templates.

Day 1: Deployment Savings

Deployments never seem to go as smoothly as expected. Thankfully, Juniper Apstra can ensure that the deployment of your data center goes as planned. That’s because every device configuration is validated before deployment to ensure that the results match the intent of the configuration. Configurations are automatically generated so there’s no opportunity of fat fingering a device. Juniper Apstra also ensures that all cabling is in place correctly.

To sum up Day 1, Apstra eliminates all the “gotchas” that usually plague deployments. And all those “gotchas” represent real, precious dollars. The Forrester study estimates that implementation time can be reduced from 24 hours to 2 hours, per device, equating to a cost savings of $72,000 over the course of three years.

Day 2: Operational Savings

The brunt of savings takes place once the data center is operational, $448,000 to be exact, according to the study. Much of these savings is due to the reduced reliance on senior-level engineers that data centers have traditionally depended on to remain running. Forrester estimates that organizations can expect a 60% reduction in FTE hours, equating to nearly 2,500 labor hours less per year for their composite organization. That’s because so many actions can be automated with the Juniper Apstra platform. No more script writing or swiveling admin consoles to multitask!

Tool Replacement Cost Savings

IT teams have traditionally used multiple third-party tool sets to manage the data center. Forrester assigned a license cost of $80,000 as the average annual license cost per tool. On average, Juniper Apstra replaces two legacy tools that also provide far more functionality. In addition, IT personnel don’t have to be trained in future third party tools and managers don’t have to spend time procuring them. All of this constitutes a sizable expected savings rate of $358,107 over a three-year period.

Creating Real, Measurable Value

The Juniper Apstra intent-based networking solution is an example of the commitment that Juniper has toward creating real, measurable value for its customers. This is substantiated by a study conducted by IDC in which they interviewed companies worldwide that have deployed Juniper products and technology solutions in their data centers. Organizations that participated in the study had just over 5,400 IT users on average and hosted 100 business applications. In addition to non-quantitative benefits such as greater agility and reliability, IDC calculated a savings of $51,121 per 100 internal application users, constituting a $2.77 million savings on average. Study participants experienced a 361% ROI over 5 years, a 56% cost reduction in operational costs and an 11-month payback period.

Conclusion

While value may be a relative term, the measurable value that Juniper delivers with their product line is substantiated and quantified. Juniper Apstra is the latest example of how intent-based networking is revolutionizing how companies design, deploy and manage the modernized data center today. Of course, cost savings should never be the sole reason to decide on a technology solution. The value of Juniper Apstra goes far beyond any quantifiable formula.

Juniper Apstra ensures that the intent of your data center matches your business intentions so that your data center performs as first envisioned. With Juniper Apstra, you can realize the power of intent along with the cost savings of automated analytics. Find out more about this powerful combination by contacting a WEI IBN expert today.

Next Steps: to learn how Juniper Apstra relieves the pain points mentioned above, staying the course with your network, and how to achieve cost savings across your network’s lifecycle.

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There used to be a single test to determine the effectiveness of your data backup strategy. It centered around successfully restoring your data from a backup, and you would rest easy knowing that you would, in theory, recover from a data loss event. It was really that simple. Still, there were some security concerns as you did not want just anyone accessing the backups who might accidently (or inadvertently) delete them. There was also the threat of confiscating a backup tape containing sensitive or valuable data by an imposter. For the most part, the data backup system was out of sight and out of mind for everyone other than the backup administrator.

Ransomware Backup Protection Systems are Now Actively Targeted

Ransomware attacks involve the loss of data, thus giving data backup systems a critical role in the battle against increasingly rampant malware. As you can imagine, the evolving nature of ransomware eventually changed the practice referenced at the start of this article. While some organizations lacked a working backup, those that had implemented and operationalized a proven system were able to elude the extortion payment.

Despite a commitment to implementing adequate backup strategies, many company leaders still consider paying the ransom. The decision to do so involves more than simply regaining access to a company’s data. Often, it is looked at as a business decision in which the opportunity cost of spending days or even weeks rebuilding virtual data stores and recovering data directories can exceed the ransom itself. While government authorities continue to discourage paying the ransom, the opportunity to recover quickly often makes practical business sense.

As you can imagine, it didn’t take long for ransomware gangs to learn that a data backup can often be the one thing holding them back from a handsome payday. That’s why backup systems have a prominent bullseye on them now. Take out the backups, and the odds are in favor of the attackers. But if your cyber security team holds the line of attack against your backups, the odds are suddenly back in your favor. That’s also where your ransomware backup protection strategy plays such a pivotal role.

While there are still plenty of threats out there involving less sophisticated attackers who look for easy prey and quick payouts using Ransomware-as-a-Service (RaaS) applications, the large-scale ransomware attacks we read about in the headlines every week are carried about by highly experienced hackers using well-coordinated attack strategies. It is these high-caliber ransomware organizations that you must prepare for.

Ransomware Attacks are Performed in Stages

Infiltrating your network is only the first step of a multipronged ransomware attack. Attackers now spend weeks or even months silently observing your systems to not only find where your data resides, but to also discover how it is protected. Unnerving, isn’t it? It is during this undetected period of observation that the attackers decide how to best eliminate your data backup system.

You may be surprised to know that these ransomware groups are more familiar with the popular backup systems on the market than the customers that use them. It’s in the best interest of the attacker to understand how to eliminate your backups, whether that means deleting, corrupting, or adjusting them. Once your backups are eliminated, the next target is your virtual infrastructure, which they intend to destroy as well. After they shut down your servers, they begin the process of encrypting your data stores. For VMware environments, the objective is then to destroy the vCenter and encrypt the VMware data stores. They use similar strategies to take down Hyper-V or Nutanix architectures as well.

Follow Recommended Cybersecurity Practices for Enhanced Ransomware Backup Protection

Properly securing your backups starts with implementing the best security standards. While air gapping is often discussed, do you know what that strategy entails? As a backup/recovery expert, I serve as WEI’s solutions architect. I regularly conduct workshops throughout the year, and recently discussed the many challenges at hand and how to prepare for them. I also identified prominent mistakes that we continue to find in real world environments.

Here are some of the top mistakes that internal cybersecurity professionals make all too often. While my discussion exclusively involved Veeam solutions, these mistakes also apply to other backup platforms:

1. Remoting into the server that hosts your backup solution: Never RDP into your backup server as these sessions can easily be compromised. Instead, use the backup system’s remote console software so that you are not logging onto the actual server.
2. Joining your backup system to Microsoft Active Directory: Besides targeting your backup system, hackers are diligently working to crack your AD. Once compromised, they can get access to privileged accounts with administrator rights to your backups.
3. Installing your backup software on a virtual server: One of the primary purposes of Veeam is to back up your VMs. If the hackers take out your virtual infrastructure, your backup system is gone, too. Consider using a physical server to host your backup solution whenever possible.
4. Only relying on passwords to protect log-on processes: Many organizations use multifactor authentication to secure their O365 logons, yet solely rely on password authentication to protect their backup logons. Sometimes this is due to the outdated attitude of “it’s only the backup server.” In this new era of ransomware, the backup server is one of the most important systems in your security arsenal. It is no longer “just the backup server.”
5. Leaving the local firewall disabled because they are unsure of what ports the hosted backup solution requires: They disable the firewall to install the new backup solution with the intention of properly configuring it at a later point. This leaves a wide-open opportunity for attack avenues that hackers easily take advantage of. Take care of your firewall configurations immediately!

Win Each Malware Battle with Robust Ransomware Backup Protection

Ransomware is a war, but it is a winnable war if you have the correct enterprise cybersecurity strategies in place. Within this war, there are battles you don’t have to fight alone as WEI’s team of backup and cybersecurity specialists can help outline a ransomware backup protection plan that fits your particular risk environment and budget. You may contact our experts at your convenience.

Next Steps: If you want to discover more proven tips and strategies to securing your backup solutions, we have published a fresh whitepaper titled, ““

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