Transforming the way you view Data Protection Service Management
Bocada designed Prism as an intuitive, workflow driven, modular, web-based, application that is aimed at both internal IT departments and Managed Service Providers to more effectively deliver data protection services to internal and external customers.
Bocada Prism is built around four process-driven modules that walk the user through a series of steps that view, report and correct and understand the policies, actions and performance of the complete data protection environment. Customizable dashboards for each module allow IT and backup administrators to drill down in each module for specific actionable information about the health, problems, policies and SLAs of the data protection environment.
Health Check Module
The DPSM process begins here with assessments that reveal the true effectiveness of the data protection environment. The Health Check Module gives IT and MSPs immediate visibility into recent and long-term operation of the environment with job trend analysis to determine inconsistencies in backup performance and opportunities for improvement. Customizable dashboards enable the environment to be viewed by geography, department, customer and other options while administrators have the ability to drill-down for problem diagnosis.
Problem Management Module
Unlike other applications that simply report backup problems, Bocada Prism provides users with the information to pinpoint, diagnose and help eliminate trouble spots and identify opportunities for improvement. This module also enables customers to quickly determine the impact of backup errors on SLAs and drill in on particular errors to reveal detailed backup activity messages and codes for further analysis and corrective action. The Problem Management Module annotates activity on clients or backups to keep track of all actions and remedies for knowledge transfer and proactively discovers unprotected (orphaned) assets.
Policy Management Module
The Policy Management module enables users to automatically view current policies and schedules, be immediately notified of any changes made to an existing policy and review the impact of that policy change on overall backup success rates. Currently this feature is available for IBM TSM and Symantec NetBackup. Prism’s ability to automate the policy creation process eliminates administrative overhead needed build and run scripts. The policy management module enables administrators to easily view information on numerous aspects of server and policy configuration, including schedules, storage, client details and job and capacity trends. A Change Analysis feature automatically tracks changes in policies and shows the impact of any policy changes on backup performance and SLAs.
SLA Management Module
The SLA phase of the DPSM process is one of the most critical for a business’s ability to meet its customer commitments, especially for MSPs. Bocada Prism’s SLA module enables users to easily track SLA performance and share results with internal or external customers via the web. Bocada Prism configures SLA profiles based on the needs of the business. Instead of simple reports indicating whether or not SLAs were achieved, Bocada Prism delivers proactive SLA impact reports, showing how SLAs will affected be by policy or infrastructure changes, and SLA trending reports, giving administrators different views of their SLAs by zones, applications, clients and more. The SLA metrics report is especially valuable to users, quickly showing which SLAs are being met, which are not and why, identifying exactly where the problem is within the data protection infrastructure.
Bocada Prism uses the SLA data to create price lists for internal and external customers based on backup activity or storage usage and automate the billing process. In addition to billing for external MSP customers, Bocada Prism creates charge-back reports for IT to send to internal business departments. Charge-back reports are a valuable business tool even when IT is not charging internal customers for backup and data protection as it exposes the costs of actually protecting the data to business units giving them a better understanding and appreciation of the DPSM process and aligns IT with business needs.
