IBM Cloud Backups for Object Storage introduced enterprise backup capabilities designed to help customers protect critical workloads and recover data when needed.
This project focused on designing the backup experience for infrastructure workloads on IBM Cloud Object Storage, translating complex storage and protection mechanisms into clear workflows for configuring policies, monitoring system health, and restoring data when needed.
Role & Responsibilities:
- Defining backup and recovery workflows across the product experience
- Aligning UX direction with product and engineering teams
- Designing policy management, monitoring, and restore experiences
- Translating infrastructure-level backup concepts into understandable user interactions
- Validating designs through usability testing with internal and sponsor users
Outcomes:
- Successful launch of enterprise backup capabilities for infrastructure workloads
- Improved clarity and usability for backup configuration and recovery workflows
- Enabled our biggest customers to protect cricial data and manage recovery more confidently
The opportunity
As more organizations moved critical workloads to cloud infrastructure, reliable backup and recovery became an essential capability. Customers needed tools that allowed them to protect data, define retention policies, and recover quickly in the event of failures or operational mistakes.
While the underlying infrastructure supported these capabilities, the experience needed to make complex protection workflows easier to configure and manage.
Improving the experience was critical for:
- Enabling organizations to protect production workloads
- Simplifying policy configuration and management
- Improving visibility into backup health and status
- Helping users recover data quickly and confidently
The challenge
Backup systems introduce a different kind of complexity compared to traditional infrastructure workflows. Users must manage:
- Backup policies and schedules
- Retention and lifecycle rules
- Monitoring and failure states
- Recovery workflows and restore points
Many of these concepts are infrastructure-driven and difficult to understand without experience in backup systems. The challenge was to design an experience that supported powerful protection capabilities while remaining understandable for users responsible for managing production environments.
Design strategy
To address these challenges, I focused on a few design principles.
Clarify the protection model: Structure the experience around how users think about protecting data rather than how backup infrastructure is implemented.
Make system health visible: Provide clear status indicators so users can quickly understand whether backups are functioning correctly.
Guide recovery workflows: Design restore flows that help users confidently recover data without needing deep knowledge of the underlying system.
These principles helped shape the structure of policy configuration, monitoring dashboards, and restore experiences.
User testing
We conducted usability sessions with internal users and sponsor customers to evaluate key workflows such as creating backup policies, monitoring backup status, and restoring data.
Testing revealed that users often struggled to understand relationships between policies, schedules, and recovery points. Iterating on the designs helped clarify these relationships and simplify the process of configuring protection rules while maintaining the flexibility required by enterprise environments.
Key experience areas
Backup Policy Creation: The experience was designed to help users define backup policies that specify schedules, retention rules, and protection targets. Clear grouping of configuration options helped users understand how policies would affect their data protection strategy.
Monitoring and System Health: Monitoring views were designed to provide clear visibility into backup status and potential failures. Users could quickly see whether backups were running successfully and identify issues that required attention.
Restore and Recovery: Restore workflows were structured to guide users through the process of selecting restore points and recovering data. The interface focused on clarity and confidence, helping users understand exactly what would happen before initiating a restore.
Outcomes
The product enabled our sponsor users to confidently protect and recover critical data while maintaining the flexibility required for enterprise environments.
By clarifying backup policies, improving system visibility, and guiding restore workflows, the experience reduced friction in one of the most critical areas of infrastructure management.
Reflection
Designing backup systems requires balancing flexibility, reliability, and clarity. Users must feel confident that their data is protected while still being able to understand how protection policies work.
This project reinforced the importance of structuring complex infrastructure workflows around user goals, ensuring that even technically sophisticated systems remain understandable and manageable.