The amount of enterprise data is growing worldwide at an accelerated rate. Many modern businesses know how to use it efficiently for other analytics and intelligence. However, they must pay a high cost to store, read, write, and move data. If these companies have no enterprise backup strategy, they will face relevant challenges.
So, wise business owners intend to extract value from their information. That allows for seamlessly creating, storing, moving, and analyzing new data pieces and ensures new revenue streams. But the issue they struggle with is to accomplish all the mentioned and control the total cost related to information ownership.
What is Enterprise Data Backup?
“Enterprise data backup” is often associated with business information management and relevant backup storage solutions.
Enterprise backup systems use computer hardware and software to move information from primary storage media to secondary ones. Here, hardware covers all the physical equipment your company uses for storing data like server networks or hard drives. Meanwhile, the software means a specific computer program that ensures the proper performance of enterprise backups. In addition, such a program helps manage data transfer from the primary location to the necessary destination.
In recent years, enterprise backup technologies have evolved significantly and promoted the appearance of cloud-based solutions. As a result, such solutions are becoming more integrated into daily business operations. That can be proved by the increasing demand for enterprise-level information backup.
Nowadays, there are multiple options available on the market. But not each system is efficient enough to meet your business requirements. So, you should remember this fact and select your enterprise backup solution thoroughly.
RPO & RTO in Data Backup
After determining the scope of your data backups, you should define their frequency and set a relevant backup schedule. Of course, your employees are continuously changing information. Thus, when disasters or malware attacks occur, all the data created after the last backup would be lost. This period (between the latest backup and the moment of failure) is known as the Recovery Point Objective (RPO). It represents the maximum period your company is willing to lose information on its systems due to an unexpected event.
Therefore, your shorter RPO will mean your company loses less information. But also, it requires more backups, along with better storage, computing, and network resources. On the other hand, a longer RPO appears more affordable, although you will lose more information.
Most small and medium-sized businesses always define the recovery point objective of 24 hours. What does it mean? You should perform daily backups. Thanks to up-to-date backup tools, you can apply RPOs as incredibly short as several minutes. Besides, your company may have tiered RPOs. That includes shorter RPOs for your essential systems and longer ones for secondary.
Another critical variable to consider is Recovery Time Objective (RTO). It shows the speed your organization needs to recover after the disaster to continue typical operations. When your company’s systems go down, you start losing money. Thus, you have to recover quickly to minimize losses. But a shorter RTO also means that you need a faster storage option, the appropriate networks, and technologies. And they appear much more costly. For lots of businesses, an RTO of several hours is reasonable.
Ultimately, you must involve your key stakeholders when discussing the system’s RPO and RTO. Then, after defining them properly, you can choose a perfect data backup solution.
5 Enterprise Backup Challenges
1. Protect large data volumes
The emerging SaaS CRM systems contribute to the significant growth of information flowing into businesses. Meanwhile, digital transformation of multiple business processes and various tech advancements also promote the increase of data volumes at unprecedented rates. Such improvements include the cloud, the internet of things (IoT), artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), e-Commerce, and social media channels.
According to IDC, “the volume of data will grow to 175 zettabytes in 2025.” It means a great challenge for businesses to deal with.
2. Secure various data types
Implementing a complete enterprise backup solution that protects data and metadata is vital for each organization. However, if your company has no metadata backups, recovering your information backed up may become incredibly precise. For instance, the metadata describing your relevant fields and objects can be lost or corrupted. Therefore, you cannot restore lost records related to these fields and objects.
3. Follow data compliance regulations
Adopting the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and other specific regulations has established stricter requirements regarding data backup. Besides, if you run your business in industries like finance or healthcare, your company has also to follow additional rules. Of course, digital transformation makes retaining long-term data much more accessible. However, organizations should preserve and protect more information to comply with necessary regulations properly.
4. Restore specific types of data
Many backup and recovery approaches appear outdated since they focus on infrastructure failures. That makes them ill-suited for the current information management needs typical for an always-on digital environment. So, your company should develop a more modern, forward-thinking method of recovering from information loss and corruption. It must provide advancements in system uptime, information monitoring options, and valid data identification.
5. Access information after the outage
Each downtime caused by the outage may cost enterprises thousands of dollars per minute. Of course, such occasions are inevitable. But successful organizations have to apply relevant approaches to mitigating the effects of these events and maintaining business continuity. For example, implementing a proactive backup and recovery tool is an efficient way to do that.
What Are the Most Spread Solutions for Enterprise Data Backup?
Today, you can find multiple types of enterprise data backup solutions. All of them deliver various RPOs and RTOs and deal with different scopes. Below, we have created a list of the most popular tools.
Hardware appliances
In most cases, such appliances involve storage that looks like a 19” rack-mounted device. This device must be installed and connected to your company’s network properly. Hardware appliances are straightforward when it comes to installing and configuring them. Often, they do not require separate provisioning servers and operating systems (OS) or installing relevant software. Thus, specific agents installed on your critical systems will conduct data backups. Meanwhile, you can access the tool using a graphical interface that the vendor also provides.
If a hardware solution fails, your business will lose the entire data backup tool. You could also back up to a secondary system. However, you have to re-provision the backup tool before recovering.
Software tools
Your company needs to install data backup software solutions on its critical systems to perform the efficient backup process. Numerous software tools allow organizations to use their current systems. But at the same time, many solutions also require provisioning specific servers fully dedicated to backups. In this case, you have to install and configure the relevant OS and data backup software. Often, there is a need to install such software on a virtual machine (VM).
Modern software tools provide better flexibility than the previous enterprise data solutions. In particular, they are helpful if you deal with numerous infrastructure-related changes. Finally, data backup software is less costly and allows your business to select and implement your own data storage.
Cloud services
Many vendors provide clients with backup-as-a-service (BaaS) solutions. Such cloud-based offerings enable businesses to provision and perform their data backups using the vendor’s cloud infrastructure. But before, they should install lightweight agents on their machines. This is because BaaS tools are simpler than software.
Sometimes, companies work with sensitive information or must follow specific regulations. So, they should define the potential acceptability of cloud backup with a chosen BaaS solution.
Hybrid solutions
Applying an all-in-one hybrid data backup tool is considered the newest innovation in the backup industry. As a result, you obtain a significant opportunity to install the necessary software or use it as a relevant cloud service if needed. Thus, hybrid solutions combine all the best features of both approaches. That makes them a perfect option for many companies.
Summing up
The appropriate enterprise data protection is vital for each modern organization. You should hold your data in a truly secure place and have constant access to it if needed. The best possible position to store your backups in the cloud. The existing cloud-based backup and disaster and recovery solutions offer more reliability than traditional backup tools.
Thanks to an efficient cloud-based solution, you can protect all your documents, servers, and data centers. Ultimately, your company can reduce the risk of potential data loss and downtime caused by different unexpected events.
Unfortunately, your organization may face different enterprise backup challenges, but among the most widespread are the following:
- Protect large data volumes
- Secure various data types
- Follow data compliance regulations
- Restore specific types of data
- Access information after the outage
Implementing an all-in-one hybrid backup solution is the best choice for numerous businesses of different types and sizes. Such a tool combines the most efficient functions of cloud services and software backup solutions.
The service life cycle allows increasing service revenue, offering add-on services, or upgrading necessary physical assets.
The key three types of business data backups are full, differential, and incremental.
To ensure the appropriate data backup and restoration processes, you must consider multiple critical issues. Among the most popular are the following:
- To ensure the reliability of scheduled backups
- To prevent missing and corrupted information
- To align information backup needs with your application architecture requirements
- To prioritize information accurately
- To protect data against ransomware attacks
Although there are different data backup solutions, cloud-based ones are among the most widely used. So, the main benefits of cloud data backup are:
- Access to data from anywhere at any time
- Increased efficiency and reliability
- Improved security
- Better convenience for your organization
On the other hand, the key drawbacks include:
- Inability to access data with no Internet connection
- Bandwidth-related problems
- Full information recovery will take some time
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