Digital transformation efforts are seeing businesses re-engineer systems and processes to become ‘data-driven’. According to research conducted by IDC, 60% of organisations have already implemented tools and methods to use data more effectively.
The issue of availability
As the name implies, data driven operations are almost entirely reliant on data. Accurate, timely, contextual information must be available whenever required to assist with decision-making and automation. This makes the issue of data protection and data recovery an even higher priority.
Historically businesses may have been able to tolerate some degree of downtime – or potentially even loss. Now that information is mission critical, neither of these is excusable. Both RTO (recovery time objective) and RPO (recovery point objective) are expected to be zero – or as close as possible.
Traditional backup systems cannot deliver
Backup systems have become increasingly complex, employing several different technologies to offer both data protection and data recovery functionality. Backup and recovery software, snapshots, mirrors and replicas all play a role in protecting systems, but they are not bulletproof – there is still the potential for loss in between captures.
Introducing continuous data protection (CDP) into your data protection strategy solves two problems. First, it will help to reduce RPO and RTO to zero. Second, CDP solves many of the problems businesses face with protecting data in their hybrid cloud environments.
Cloud trends
The issue of data backup in the cloud is of particular importance. As part of their digital transformation efforts, businesses are ever more reliant on hosted platforms like Microsoft Azure and AWS.
Your data protection provisions will need to adapt to accommodate these hybrid systems, including containerised applications and any data held in SaaS services. In most cases, the best way to achieve this functionality without over-complicating your backup infrastructure is using CDP.
Unavoidable and urgent
The constant threat posed by malware, particularly ransomware, means that businesses need to act now to protect themselves. According to IDC, 91.5% of businesses have suffered a malicious attack in the past 12 months – and 36.6% have experienced more than 25 attacks over the same period.u
Clearly it is now a case of ‘when’ not ‘if’ as every business will experience a cyberattack in the near future – often repeatedly. Each attack can be expensive due to employee overtime, lost productivity, direct cost of recovery and any costs associated with data that is permanently lost.
CDP is particularly resilient to ransomware attacks, storing immutable backups that cannot be changed or overwritten. As such, it is an excellent addition to your data protection strategy – particularly as it can be deployed to provide backups of data stored in the cloud or on premise.
To learn more about Continuous Data Protection and its role in your digital transformation efforts, please give us a call.