The patent describes new techniques that will be implemented in Cobalt Iron Compass, the firm’s enterprise SaaS backup platform, to optimize cloud and on-premises computing resources automatically. The aim is to make IT operations more secure, cost-effective, and better-performing.

Security administrators, backup administrators, and other IT leaders responsible for IT operations are increasingly turning to the cloud for various aspects of enterprise data protection. However, cloud resources are rarely used efficiently, which leads to high costs, inefficient data protection, and poor service levels for backups and restores. In addition, cloud resource utilization is often statically configured and unresponsive to changing conditions and events. Some conditions, such as changes in backup operational behavior, availability, or performance of cloud resource services, might indicate the need to use other on-premises or cloud computing resources to process various data protection effectively. As a result, enterprises need a more dynamic way to reconfigure cloud and on-premises computing resource usage that is responsive to operational and security conditions.

Cobalt Iron’s new patented techniques were developed to address these challenges through infrastructure analytics that determine responses to changing conditions and optimal usage of cloud and on-premises resources. They can dynamically adjust the use of these resources by IT operations for data backups or disaster recovery, based on operational behavior and conditions such as poor operational performance or cyber-events.

Techniques disclosed in this patent include monitoring for changes in various operational and security conditions associated with a cloud computing operation. They also analyze the operational and security conditions to determine the optimal configuration of on-premises and cloud computing resources to perform a given cloud computing operation. They can dynamically reconfigure the cloud computing operation to use the optimal combination of resources.