The Evolution Of Continuous Data Protection

By Author: Jenifer Sahn
Total Articles: 45
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Data backup is integral to any organization’s standard IT activities. The importance of storing essential business data for future use can never be ignored and therefore there is always this need to implement suitable data backup and recovery solution to meet your purpose. Continuous data protection technology is seen to be rapidly picking up momentum in terms of its acceptance as a reliable mode of data storage and restoration. Gone are those days when people were apprehensive about the practicality of the revolutionary continuous data protection concept. Today CDP products are increasingly being deployed by companies across industries to execute their critical backup processes.


The reasons continuous data protection failed

Continuous data protection operates by saving copy of files every time some changes are made to them. This enables recovery to any point in time. By lowering recovery point objective or RTO and recovery time objective (RTO), CDP promises to reduce system downtime and ensure business continuity. However in spite of the advantages provided by CDP it experienced ...
... slow market adoption. The first reason being that CDP products were mostly being offered by startups when they first appeared in the market. Moreover CDP solutions were pitched as alternative to conventional backup. And very few people were convinced about the efficiency of continuous data protection software as compared to traditional backup.


Technologically speaking CDP products were deficient in application awareness and were also not capable of providing both on-site and off-site copies of data. All these factors together contributed to the failure of the CDP technology in the initial phase.


But now we see a remarkable increase in CDP use. So much so that its popularity is on par with data deduplication technology that has always received a far more favorable market response. Now CDP product are being offered be major IT vendors and the technology has also been improved upon to be compatible with other application and to tender both offsite and on-site protection.


Why continuous data protection is being largely utilized today

If statistics are to be followed companies with large amount of data to backup are generally found to be resorting to CDP. With advancement of technology companies are faced with the challenge of backing up larger systems and greater volumes of data in much less time. The increasing use of high density virtual servers also adds to the problem. The usage of CDP allows them to address the issues related to limited backup windows while ensuring data protection. A large number of organizations use continuous data protection in combination with snapshots to enable a full-proof disaster recovery process.


Emergence of near-CDP

Some people confuse snapshots with CDP. This has led CDP providers to come up with the new near-CDP technology that combine the features of snapshot based products and replication. The only difference between CDP and near-CDP is that CDP supports an RPO of zero seconds while near-CDP RPO is based on the frequency at which the snapshots are to be taken. However both the technologies provide instantaneous recovery.


Continuous data protection software has evolved with time and today it is the choice of maximum number of organization looking for reliable data backup and recovery method.