In an always-on world, Record-ish holds true to technology dating back over 40+ years, delivering the legacy backup capabilities that organisations of all sizes can implement to meet the needs of the pre-cloud era. But, behind the headlines, Record-ish delivers an important message...
This outdated technology is making a huge impact on modern enterprises where hybrid digital infrastructure is evolving. The Record-ish story is a satirical reaction to the momentum seen in the backup market. In reality, Zerto is offering to help businesses shift to true continuous replication with zero data loss for full-time data protection. With IT transformation now central to the fortunes of businesses in every sector, modernisation and cloud adoption rely on continuous, ‘always on’ availability - rather than solutions that are ‘sometimes there.’ By delivering backup services with zero data loss to public cloud market leaders such as AWS and Microsoft Azure, Zerto delivers new backup for a new world.
However, the backup industry is still operating in the same way it was decades ago, relying on periodic snapshots - rather than Continuous Data Protection (CDP). As a CDP leader, Zerto enables users to protect all their files, rather than just critical workloads.
Continuous data protection - maintaining an always-on customer experience
Continuous Data Protection allows organisations to automatically capture and track data modifications, saving every version of user-created data locally or at a target repository. With little-to-no production overhead, incremental writes are replicated continuously and saved to a journal file. CDP’s change block tracking also allows users or administrators to restore data to any point in time with remarkable granularity.
CDP delivers advantages over the Record-ish backup strategies across multiple key areas:
Real-time block-level replication
CDP utilises change-block tracking to constantly replicate data as it is written to storage. Because CDP is always-on, it offers considerably lower Recovery Point Objectives (RPOs) than snapshot-based solutions – this means almost no data loss.
Snapshots vs. continuous data protection
Continuous data replication allows organisations to replicate data as changes occur, delivering recovery intervals of mere seconds. Snapshots are scheduled rather than continuous, because of their impact on production, meaning recovery intervals of hours.
Journal-based any point-in-time recovery
Journal-based recovery keeps a constant log of all the changes users make to applications and data. Because the changes are continuously written to the datastore, CDP delivers any point-in-time recoverability to within a specified time frame.
Enterprise scalability
The journal can be placed on any datastore with maximum size limits and warnings – preventing the datastore from filling which would otherwise break replication. Using snapshots provides no way of controlling the total space used, so snapshot solutions are not scalable in terms of SLAs and efficiency.
The bottom line is: what has worked in the past, will not work for the future. Any company still relying on expensive, dedicated backup and disaster recovery infrastructure should be evaluating a software-only platform based on a foundation of CDP.
IDC, for instance, predicts the same amount of application development over the last four decades will continue - but at an accelerated pace and will be crammed into the next five years.
But how many organisations can say they are fully prepared and confident in their ability to handle these workloads?
The risks are very real. From ransomware attacks and database corruption to accidental deletions, data and application availability can no longer be considered separately. Modern workload movement technology allows applications to move seamlessly from on-premise to multi-cloud. Data availability must move in tandem to assure the greatest agility and meet availability SLAs. Applications and data must remain available, regardless of the disruption, because customer relations and loyalty leave little room for downtime or data loss.
Take ransomware, for example, which is becoming one of the fastest growing recovery scenarios for businesses around the world. Once an organisation falls victim to a ransomware attack, files are locked down. And if the latest backup is from last night, last week, or, even last month, the questions become, “How much data can we stand to lose?” and, “What’s this going to cost the business?”
For many businesses, being on the receiving end of a ransomware attack is only a matter of time. The problem is, having to restore to a day-old or even week-old backup means data loss and increased time and expense in recovery efforts.
Smart companies are making the switch to solutions based on continuous data protection that meets the availability SLA’s required of today’s business while supporting hybrid and multi-cloud environments. IDC reports that 70% of CIOs have a cloud-based strategy for application deployment. Their Technology Spotlight Report examines a new era of backup and recovery, answering questions on best practices and how organisations can future proof their infrastructure.
To find out more about Record-ish, visit https://www.record-ish.com