Today, data is the asset to end all assets. If you’re responsible for managing it at your organization, you already know that: You’re tasked with securing it, backing it up, and keeping it highly available to keep the business up and running.
But what you may not know is that backups can be a stockpile of great data to tap into. When backups are lightweight, packaged, and portable, these IT mainstays are more than just insurance policies providing peace of mind. You can clone snapshots in minutes, on premises or in the cloud, without needing a ton of extra space or resources, driving data reuse at scale. They’re keys to unlock productivity, innovation, better security, and more.
If you’ve mostly thought of backups as a backup plan, it may be time to start thinking of these idle resources as multipurpose, built-in accelerants you can use for innovation and ultimately true bottom-line business results. Read on to learn how, but first, let’s look at the difference between modern and legacy backups.
Modern Backups vs. Legacy Backups—There’s a Difference
Backups have always been critical to business. But looking at legacy backup infrastructure and its limitations, it’s easy to see why they haven’t always been cohorts in high-velocity strategies.
It boils down to how they’re stored. Legacy backups are locked in silos and complex disk-to-tape backup architectures that struggle to keep up. Sometimes, backup appliances flat-out break down under the stress—especially when using backup data at scale. And the sheer space and resources legacy backups require make them clunky at best.
Modern backup storage has to address these old issues head-on. That means delivering:
- Visibility into data to reduce blind spots: Backup data shouldn’t be a black hole—it should be a gold mine.
- Collection and protection: If you store your backups like an insurance policy, that’s as far as they’ll go. Backups need to be accessible without compromising productivity.
- Integration into your broader data and IT infrastructure: Allow backups to be reused and shared downstream for other applications and scenarios rather than just disaster recovery.
- Backups that many teams can leverage and derive value from: Package them like burdens or by-products, and that will be the extent of their value. Make them consumable, and they can become valuable to others in your organization besides developers and IT managers.
- A unified storage solution to reduce fragmentation, copy sprawl, and budget waste on redundant copies: ESG reports that CIOs worry about the amount of data copies currently being managed in their organizations and the cost it incurs. On average, organizations store six copies of the same data.
Now that we know what modern data backup really means and what it can deliver, let’s take a deeper look into everything you could be doing with your backup data to accelerate innovation and productivity.
1. Mine Data Backups for Insights
The faster your analytics can move, the faster your decision-making will too.
Analytics continues to be where major competitive advantage lies in 2025, and it remains one of the biggest trends in digital transformation. Modern analytics has huge potential to reduce risk, boost efficiency, and ensure continuity. But there’s often a conundrum: Trying to analyze modern data on legacy systems can make the wheels come off critical operations.
When you have new questions to ask of your data, being able to access backup data that’s simple and performant can give analytics efforts major agility. A unified data backup solution can provide quick access to a large amount of high-quality data so you can easily analyze massive data sets and derive insights without impacting production systems.
2. Accelerate Agility and Time to Market for New Features and Innovations
The quicker your developers can move, the faster your organization can offer new features and improvements. DevOps, by nature, moves fast and relies on virtual environments, often in containers, for iterative, test-driven development. But rigid software development life cycles and staging environments can have limitations. Snapshots remove these hurdles and help to further reduce the iterative loop.
Production-quality snapshots are sandboxes just waiting to be leveraged. You can create them in seconds with a fraction of the disk space compared to traditional test master databases, which can take as much time and space to create as the original. With modern cloud-integrated snapshots, you can create clones in the cloud that consume minimal additional cloud storage.
Developers get a more accurate simulation of real-world production demands—a virtually “live” environment, without the risk. Teams can use actual data instead of dummy data, and more than one developer can spin up their own independent environments too. The result? Accelerated application development, on premises and in the cloud.
3. Reduce Deployment Risks with More Accurate Testing, Training, and QA
Piggybacking on increased development agility, replicas of application data also help you accurately run tests to ensure performance and security. If you’re already backing up virtual machines (VMs) in production, you could be using those cloned environments for use cases that go beyond data protection like testing, training, security, and QA.
Faster, more thorough testing means fewer bugs and patches—which can pay back in spades.
From a QA standpoint, staging environments can pale in comparison to the test coverage backups can provide. Staging isn’t always sufficient as the only type of testing before an entire rollout, so when you want more depth and accuracy, a production environment snapshot or backup can get you closer.
You might also create isolated copies for simulated production environments where developers can train other developers on their code; troubleshoot issues; or run QA, patch, and security tests without impacting production. These can be self-service, easily shared among teams, and quickly provisioned and deprovisioned as needed.
4. Boost Productivity and Success for AI/ML Teams
AI and machine learning (ML) projects have different demands than traditional software projects. They require volumes of high-quality data to train and improve the models. But without access to highly mobile data sets, models can struggle to make it into production. It’s a common conundrum that puts a strain on both the data science and DevOps teams managing the data pipelines.
In 2025, AI integration has become the top data storage trend, with AI increasingly used for tasks such as tiering, migration, optimization, provisioning, and data protection. Snapshots can give data science teams unfettered access to high-quality, near-real-time data and dedicated training environments with actual data. This can make AI/ML initiatives a reality and drive competitive advantage.
Modern backup solutions now incorporate AI-powered threat detection to monitor backups and flag potential security issues during the process. This adds an additional layer of protection while ensuring your AI/ML teams have the data they need.
5. Improve Network and Application Security
It’s no surprise that more ambitious digital transformation initiatives stall out when outdated, unreliable security technology gets in the way. When you consider how disparate data is these days—no longer just locked away onsite but spread across multicloud, hybrid cloud, and containers—the need for more modern protections is a natural first step.
Backups are a perfect opportunity to take a closer look at the fabric of your applications’ and network’s security. Scan them thoroughly for modern threats and dormant malware that hasn’t been detected yet, or securely share copies with professional vulnerability experts and pentesters who can run scans without any system downtime.
With immutable snapshots like Pure Storage® SafeMode™ Snapshots, you can more deftly avoid ransomware and embrace hybrid and multicloud services with confidence. SafeMode employs immutable, indelible snapshots to safeguard against unauthorized changes or deletions, ensuring that backups remain reliable and accessible even during a ransomware attack.
6. Use Integrations to Improve Organizational Data Management
For organizations leveraging virtualization platforms like VMware, integrating solutions such as Veeam with Pure Storage hardware snapshots offers a highly efficient and secure backup process. This integration eliminates the need to present all logical unit numbers (LUNs) to hardware proxies, streamlining operations while maintaining data security.
Specifically, this helps with:
- Efficient backup and recovery: Veeam integrates seamlessly with Pure Storage FlashArray™ snapshots, enabling faster backups with minimal impact on production systems and rapid recovery at scale to ensure business continuity.
- Support for modern data governance: As federated governance becomes more prevalent in 2025, organizations are adopting decentralized models where domain-specific teams manage their data while adhering to company-wide standards. This approach balances autonomy with global consistency and is particularly relevant for large enterprises managing diverse data environments.
- Scalability and agility: Veeam DataLabs allows organizations to use Pure Storage snapshots to create isolated test environments. These environments support testing, analytics, and development without impacting production workloads, driving innovation while maintaining compliance.
Rethinking Data Reuse for 2025? Good. You’re on the Right Track
Backup modernization has come a long way since 2020. Today, modern all-flash storage and snapshots are giving backups more agility. Faster restores can take data reuse scenarios out of neutral so you can leverage these self-contained copies for other capacities.
In 2025, advanced solutions like Pure Storage SafeMode offer robust protection through immutable snapshots that cannot be deleted without a multi-step verification process. With Auto-on SafeMode introduced in Purity//FA 6.4.10, all new volumes have baseline protections through SafeMode-protected snapshots, working in the background until needed.
Many miss the fact that, just like legacy IT solutions, out-of-date storage solutions will make it hard to ask more from data. Investing in better data backup storage is an investment in digital transformation. So put it into fifth gear and hit it.e legacy IT solutions, out-of-date storage solutions will make it hard to ask more from data. Investing in better data backup storage is an investment in digital transformation. So put it into fifth gear and hit it.
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