The Value in Continuous Data Protection
How safe is your data? If it’s not backed up, you risk massive data loss, making the retrieval of important documents and files close to impossible.
Not only can data loss disrupt your operations and lead to a loss in revenue, but it can also hurt your organization’s reputation and get you in hot water with regulatory agencies.
Data loss statistics are alarming enough to keep anyone up at night. According to Unitrends, 94% of companies that suffer a catastrophic data loss end up not reopening at all or closing their doors within two years.
Though most modern organizations understand the need for robust data protection, issues around slow recoveries, limited physical disk storage, and corrupted data still present challenges. By implementing a continuous data protection backup solution, organizations can elevate their data management and improve overall data security.
What is Continuous Data Protection & How Does It Work?
Continuous data protection, or CDP for short, is a real-time data backup solution that creates a backup whenever a change is made to your system. As the term suggests, it’s like having a continuous, perpetual record of the data being stored in your organization.
Before CDP, organizations would create complete backups at specified intervals, often daily. The problem with this approach is that the amount of data to be backed up would continue to grow exponentially, making backups increasingly time-consuming and expensive.
Continuous data backup solves capacity limitations by creating a backup of the original data and then updating the backups based on changes and new files. The rationale is that once you back up an original file, you don’t have to keep backing up the same data. Only new or modified blocks of data need to be backed up.
In addition to resulting in a dramatic reduction in the quantity of data to be backed up, the backup window shrinks from nightly to every few minutes.
What Kind of Data Can be Backed Up?
In short, any data saved on a computer can be backed up via continuous data backup. This includes:
– Documents
– Spreadsheets
– Images
– Videos
– Websites
– Application data
– Emails, and text messages
How Can Continuous Backup Services Benefit My Organization?
Having a continuous backup system ensures an organization always has a backup of the most recent data. For example, if a significant change is made before a nightly backup with traditional methods and something happens to the system, that change could be lost forever.
Further, CDP allows data recovery to occur quickly. In the event of a data disaster, you can roll back the clock to the last version of clean data and pull those records.
With CDP systems with a recovery point objective of zero, this means you can set the data recovery clock to the second. Other systems that are classified as “near-continuous” protection give you a closer window than traditional backups – usually about an hour, depending on your scheduled backups.
And, because only the changed records and files are being backed up, organizations find that server performance is unaffected.
Other benefits of continuous backup services include:
- Recover the most recent copy of a file even if a virus, ransomware attack, or corruption isn’t discovered right away
- Gain the ability to recover data quickly, often in seconds instead of hours or days with traditional backup systems
- Replicate backups in other locations to provide a protective redundancy in the event of an issue with the primary backup server
Guarantee Tomorrow by Backing up Your Data Today
Don’t wait for disaster to strike before implementing a data storage and recovery solution that protects your organization’s most valuable asset.
With more than 20 years of experience and best-in-class tools and technology, our IT experts can create a tailored solution that fits your data security needs and budget.
Contact us online to inquire about the next steps in implementing continuous data protection, or give us a call at 713-586-6430 for more information.
