Need a kick in the butt to bolt down your data protection strategy? Look no further than the tumultuous world of cybersecurity. According to an
annual study conducted by Ponemon Institute, the average cost of a data breach reached $3.86 million in 2018, a 6.4 percent increase over the previous year. The study also reported an increase in the average cost of individual stolen records, suggesting what most us already know ― our data is more valuable than ever. When it comes to safeguarding your data, strategical options span well beyond conventional backups. In this post, we explore two of the most popular
data protection technologies, continuous data protection (CDP) and snapshots.
Some business processes are so critical that the slightest amount of downtime could prove detrimental to the organization. CDP is designed with these mission-critical processes in mind. Continuous data protection copies or replicates data as it is written to disk. Whereas replication in general does not create recovery points, CDP keeps track of all changes that take place over time. As a result, organizations have the luxury of point-in-time (PIT) capabilities that make it possible to recover data from multiple points in the history of the system. The 'always-on' component of replication enables continuous data protection to offer a substantially lower recovery point objective (RPO) than traditional backup solutions. CDP essentially captures each point in time, which in turn, creates granular recovery possibilities. While achieving zeros across your recovery points is a lofty objective, this technology can help organizations incur considerably less data loss when disaster strikes.
Snapshot offer a quick and effective way to rewind a system to desirable points in time. While they can be considered a fail-safe of sorts, they are not a reliable backup alternative. Snapshots reside on the systems they are designed to protect and thus depend on those systems to perform recovery operations. They can also lead to performance issues over time as more points are created on the system. Conversely, backups can existence independently, travel across multiple storage systems, with little to no impact on live production environments.
CDP Explained
Snapshots Defined
Speaking of PIT, it is literally what snapshots are made of. A snapshot is basically the state of a storage system captured at a given point in time. Preserving the system state not only allows data to be recovered in the event of failure but restored to known working points. This is helpful in various scenarios. For example, snapshots can be used to roll back to a time before installing and uninstalling software, updating the system, or upgrading hardware components. They're also useful for developers when testing and validating application code in virtual machines.