Introduction

Data protection in today's world is becoming more critical than ever. With increasing amounts of data in this all-connected world comes more data that needs to be protected. As shown in the Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG) 2016 report, backup is one of the top five priorities that IT administrators continue to have in today's world:

System Center 2019's Data Protection Manager (DPM) is the latest release by Microsoft, and with it comes a lot of improvements and new features. DPM is well-recognized in the industry for protection of Microsoft workloads and VMware environments. With DPM 2019, you can back up the most common workloads that exist in any modern data center today. 

The following diagram provides an overview of the DPM backup functionality:

Typical malware attacks that happen today include ransomware, which is where target machines are forced to either re-encrypt their data or remove it permanently. If production data is impacted, then the backups that follow are impacted on too. Microsoft System Center DPM and Azure backup now provide security features that protect sensitive data. These security features ensure that you are able to secure your backups and recover your data if the production and backup servers are compromised. These features are built on three main principles—Prevention, Alerting, and Recovery—that help organizations to increase preparedness against attacks and equip them with a robust backup solution.

This chapter is designed to provide you with the necessary skills and techniques for dealing with installing and upgrading tasks for your Microsoft System Center DPM server. After reading this chapter, you will have the knowledge to carry out common DPM installation, migration, and planning activities, such as configuring the DPM firewall, calculating the storage requirements, preparing the SQL Server for the DPM database, installing and upgrading to the latest release of DPM, automating the installation of DPM, and much more.