A new study reveals that critical shortcomings in standard data protection strategies are putting organizations at increased risk of downtime and data loss. IDC researchers report that an alarming 93 percent of organizations across North America and Western Europe suffered a data-related business disruption during the past 12 months with nearly 60 percent experiencing unrecoverable data loss.
Many losses can be attributed to outdated backup and disaster recovery processes designed for a time before organizations had vast amounts of data distributed across multiple data centers, branch offices, cloud repositories, edge servers and endpoint devices. More than 70 percent of the IT and business leaders surveyed by IDC said they are no longer confident that their existing backup and DR processes can ensure recovery from ransomware, malware or other data-related disruptions.
There’s good reason for that pessimism. A separate Vanson Bourne study finds that nearly 60 percent of all backup jobs fail, often because the backup job overruns the allocated backup window. When that happens, the backup must be terminated before it’s finished so that it doesn’t interfere with business processes. Faced with this dilemma, many companies gamble that they can get by without backup.
Closing the Backup Window with CDP
In response to these challenges, IDC says organizations should strongly consider adopting continuous data protection (CDP) solutions that simplify recovery, provide a hedge against ransomware and significantly reduce the potential for data loss. CDP solutions back up applications, files or blocks of data any time a change is made, which effectively eliminates the notion of a backup window because backup is occurring all the time.
Deployed either in the cloud or as an on-premises software solution, CDP creates an electronic journal of complete storage snapshots — one for every instance in which data modification occurs. This provides the option to recover to extremely granular points in time to minimize data loss. For example, if an attack or outage occurs at 1 p.m., an administrator can retrieve the data as it existed at 12:59 p.m.
By making sub-minute recovery point objectives (RPOs) a reality, CDP helps ensure the protection of an organization’s most recent data, which is often its most valuable data. Studies show that most data recovery requests are for relatively recent data, which may not be available with traditional backup methods in which periodic snapshots can be hours behind production systems.
Minimizing Ransomware Risks
The ability to restore data to near-real-time status makes CDP effective in combatting surging levels of ransomware attacks. In fact, CDP solutions can even serve as an early warning system for ransomware infections. Because CDP only replicates data when it is created or modified, snapshots tend to be very frequent but quite small. However, ransomware infections modify large numbers of files in a very short period of time, which will likely create a sudden and significant spike in backup activity. Such unusual activity can alert administrators and give them a chance to quickly launch countermeasures.
CDP backups can be replicated to cloud storage or another offsite storage site for disaster recovery purposes. In the event of a disaster, CDP offers a streamlined restore process. In conventional backup operations, you may have to clone the backup to a new storage device and mount it onto a production server. However, CDP solutions allow you to restore data directly to production environments, resulting in extremely fast recovery times.
Data backup and disaster recovery are becoming increasingly difficult, putting organizations at heightened risk of data loss. Contact us to learn more about using CDP to enhance your data protection capabilities.
