We take the concept of ‘backing up’ our data for granted. “Of course I back up, who does not protect their data.” Wrong! Backing up is the buying insurance equivalent of IT. Its passive, its reactive – that’s not todays IT, it has to be now, real time, active – data protection has to match business. Recovery and resiliency are the ‘now’ of data protection and are how you match data protection to how today’s IT operates.
So what does it mean to be active in data protection or to provide business resiliency? It involves three key concepts that transform the passive activity of backup into an active effort – making the recovery process intelligent, adding disaster recovery to backup and ensuring that you can recover every time.
Intelligent recovery
Blindly making copies of data files (with an associated index) once a day does not cut it in today’s world. Modern companies need to have duplicated copies to be sure, but those copies need to add value, not just add to the number of hard drives you own.
It starts with having multiple restore points at minute intervals during the day. Your recovery points should be granular enough to match the value of your business, say every 15 minutes – for everything, application, OS, data – the entire stack. Once you have these granular recovery points, then you need to be able to transform your backup to any format you need, no matter how it was protected originally – physical, virtual, cloud. Any to any recovery, migration and form transformation all need to be a part of the intelligent process.
Built in local and remote disaster recovery
Your data protection process needs to include local and remote disaster recovery. You need to be able to immediately standup a failed machine locally (in a virtual machine) so that SLA are preserved. Application owners don’t get SLA measured in days, why should backup admins?
To protect against site or geo failures, your backups need to be efficiently replicated offsite. Your data protection solution needs to be able to both do the optimized (de-duplicated) replication as well as have the ability to rapidly stand up a machine(s) at a remote site in the event of a failure.
Recovery assurance
You have to be sure you can recover – every time, period. An active data protection solution ensures this by mounting your backups and checking that they are recoverable. You can’t afford to be one of the crowd that finds out that they cannot restore a database or email when they need it most.
So as you think about your business goals moving forward, take a moment to consider how you can better match recovery and business resiliency to your business outcomes. It’s time to transform our thinking on backup and make it an active and positive part of IT. Thanks for reading and next time I will talk a little about how much it costs business to stay with old backup tool and processes. Spoiler alert, complacency costs a lot more than you think.
Eric Endebrock