Choosing The Right Continuous Data Protection Software For Your Backup Need

By Author: Jenifer Sahn
Total Articles: 45
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As companies experience increase in data volume, traditional data backup solutions prove inefficient in the sense that they take longer to complete backups. With backup time extending beyond the stipulated time frame, daily IT operation gets disrupted. Moreover keeping in mind the present competitive scenario businesses now look for shorter recovery time objective (RTO) and recovery point objective (RPO). Continuous data protection software has emerged to help companies struggling to manage this ever increasing time crunch and to guard data on the fly. This technology helps in remarkably reducing backup windows and allowing quick data restoration down to the individual disk write operation. Now there are several products available in the market, but you need to keep certain aspects in mind before settling for one.


The applications to be supported by continuous data protection software


Such software may not be suitable for all kinds of backup requirements. In many cases backup and recovery needs are optimally met with technologies, like snapshots and replication and you need ...
... not deploy such technology. Continuous data protection software has particular relevance if you have the need to protect limited number of applications operating in highly transactional environments. Therefore it is important to understand the type of applications that the data protection software will be required to protect, and then select a suitable product.


Selection of proper data security product type


There are basically two varieties of products available in the market. Some data guard appliances can be used as servers which come furnished with software and storage that help in quick deployment. You can also buy data security products in the form of software that can be installed on a server in the enterprise, using the server's storage or other storage in the data center. Now the software based product is less costly, but it will take greater technical expertise and time to get installed than hardware-based appliances. Another important thing to remember is that such data-protection journal may require 5-40% more space for storage and therefore there has to be sufficient storage space for such platform.


Effect of continuous data-protection on network performance


Continuous data protection software usage requires good network bandwidth. The additional traffic created due the transfer of data from the application(s) to the product may sometime adversely affect the network performance. However the problem is more prominent with in-band products than the Out-of-band products typically impose few traffic problems. You need to assess any data security product in advance to avoid creating any undesirable impact on the enterprise network.



Security concerns associated with continuous data protection software


With many data security products, users are allowed to perform the data restoration themselves, thereby posing serious data security concerns. So understanding the safety issues that might be involved in data access and restoration is very important before actually using such product.


Continuous data protection software is undoubtedly a step ahead of the curve in terms of data backup methodologies. But it addresses a specific data security need and therefore should not be considered as a replacement for traditional data backup technologies, like snapshots or tape backup.