According to the 2019 Telstra Security Report, 65 per cent of Australian businesses were interrupted due to a breach in 2018. Moreover, the Ponemon Institute claims that the average cost of a data breach is USD$1.99 million, resulting from lost workplace productivity, compromised band image, and the corrupted business data.
So, why are businesses losing data?
There are many reasons for that, from a malicious email your employee opened to the issues with your servers. Irrespective of its cause, downtime can affect your business’ performance in multiple ways. Most importantly, businesses don’t invest in an incident response plan. The abovementioned Telstra study shows that 1 in 4 companies are not prepared for a cyberattack.
Just because you use antivirus software doesn’t mean you’re safe from today’s sophisticated cyberattacks.
To protect your data and ensure you can survive a data breach, you need to back up everything you do. And, one of the most effective and reliable options is continuous data protection.
Here is what it is and what its main benefits are for your business.
What is continuous data protection, and why does it matter?
Today, the migration to the cloud has become inevitable for businesses of all shapes and sizes.
There are numerous options to choose from, depending on your company’s different needs. Public clouds are more affordable and, as such, are the choice of many young companies and small businesses operating with a limited budget.
If you want to maximise your online performance and tighten your data security, then choosing private cloud providers is right for you. There are also hybrid clouds that let you combine the features of private and public cloud infrastructures.
However, parallel with the transition to the cloud, cybersecurity risks are growing. To maintain the utmost data security, businesses need to perform regular data backups. This is where frustrating and time-consuming snapshot-based backups may fail.
This is why many enterprises are switching to a far more sophisticated continuous data protection (CDP) backup.
The way it works is pretty simple – it runs in the background of your network, reads any changes made to data and backs them up almost instantly. This means more efficient data storage, no impact on the server performance, and granular data recovery. To increase your data accessibility and transparency, you can maintain your backups in the cloud environment.
Now that you know what continuous data protection is, here are a few reasons why to invest in it:
Minimal impact on server performance
One of the significant problems related to old school backups is their higher recovery point objective (RPO), as they read and store far more data. With the rising amount of data that needs to be stored, each traditional backup will become even slower and may hurt your overall server performance.
Precisely because of that, many organisations choose to schedule such lengthy backups during low-activity periods, such as weekends. This may lead to some security risks, as your data will remain unprotected in the meantime. Moreover, if your system experiences any backup failures, you will need to hire an IT team during the off-hours, meaning that the costs of the maintenance will also grow.
This is something you want to avoid, and CDN can definitely help.
Namely, continuous data protection backups use the so-called changed-block tracking, meaning that your data is continually being replicated as it is written to your storage. Servers need to process just the incremental changes that happen between two backups, meaning that you won’t need to store massive amounts of data at once.
More efficient data storage
Storing data using CDP is undoubtedly simpler. As no snapshots are created, continuous data protection can dramatically save your disk space. Namely, with continuous data protection backups, you’re basically performing a full backup only once.
After that, you’re recycling existing data over and over again, without using any additional disk space. Most importantly, freeing up your disk space may also impact your cloud storage plan, keeping the costs of the storage more affordable.
Improving data recovery
One of the major disadvantages of traditional backups is data security. Namely, if you schedule backups every day at 8 PM, this means that the data you create during the next day will remain unprotected until the next backup. Therefore, if your server breaks or you experience a cyberattack, chances are you will lose your data.
CDP works differently, as it uses journal-based replication technologies. Just like I’ve already mentioned above, the data is stored as soon as it is created. Therefore, the backup system is always-on, providing more granular data storage and having lower RPOs than snapshot-based alternatives, meaning that there is no data loss.
Providing granular backups
Now, you’re probably wondering what happens when an employee deletes a file accidentally or wants to view a previous version of a document?
Well, CDP solutions store multiple versions of each file. Therefore, an employee can roll back a day, week, or month to find previous versions of the file, without having to restore the whole system.
Over to you
For example, you should know that the processes of data recovery, as well as backup granularity, vary a lot, based on a wide range of factors. The costs of investing in CDP may also grow, as it requires you to invest in expensive hardware.
However, this is an investment that, in the long run, may benefit your business in multiple ways. From real-time data monitoring and protection to the sophisticated data recovery processes, CDP still has numerous advantages when compared to legacy backups.
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