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DATA RECOVERY
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Can you remember what used to happen if one of your data files got corrupted , infected , lost or deleted ? Most likely your only choice was to go to IT , cap in hand , and ask to be restored to the backup from the night before – if it was done . Wait , I hear you cry , that accurately describes our current procedure !
As outdated and digitally backward as this scenario sounds , this is the actual reality for far too many businesses today . Backups are performed nightly in a feeble effort to avoid adverse impact on IT performance during business hours , and so if the file that you created today is lost , deleted , corrupted or infected , it may be that your only choice is to grit your teeth and start again .
While this is not only massively frustrating for the user who is under increasing pressure to be more productive , it is also the foundation of a very shaky data recovery plan : can you imagine the impact if the entire company were to lose the files created or substantially changed in a single day and having to revert to a 24-hour old backup ? At best it would be time intensive and costly and who is looking after the customers while this unnecessary distraction takes place ?
Moving beyond the past If this trip back to the present [ sic ] causes you concern , fear not : there is a new approach , a new and highly effective reality . What if you could go back to the file or folder just seconds before it was infected or corrupted and not 24-hours ago : what if you could go back to any specific point in time , any time in the last fortnight ? Now that should help to release some endorphins and ease the pain !
With a continuously protected system , a user is able to recover to highly granular and specific points in time ; points that are taken every few seconds over the proceeding 14 previous days . The ability to recover any journal checkpoint allows users to calmly complete a data restore immediately prior to data corruption , error or any other event that may have occurred , without impacting their productivity . As you can see this moves far beyond the outmoded and begrudged action of the daily backup : this is Disaster Recovery ( DR ) creatively evolved to supersede backup , establishing it as a key part of a more holistic IT security strategy and in fact , a complete business continuity plan .
Traditional recovery methods only allow file system objects to be restored from these nightly , infrequent and unreliable backups . This can result in significant data loss and subsequent rework that impacts productivity . Furthermore , these archaic methods impose a significant performance , storage and management overhead on the production data . With an uninterrupted DR capability , this overhead and complexity are removed as data is continuously replicated with no snapshots and no impact to production or the performance of the protected virtual machines . most frequent data centre support requests , so this is going to be great news for the IT department . When the IT support team can restore your data from the seconds before it was lost , they will become not only a hero in the users eyes , but the senior executives should also appreciate that the user will not waste their time recreating work that is already done , in turn allowing them to stay focused on the task in hand .
As you can see , this is great news for the business as well . For business leaders , this level of data recovery gives them greater confidence in data restoration from SAP , SQL , and Oracle , as well as user data in the home folder and file shares . It ’ s crucial for the modern collaborative workforce with a job to be done .
The cost of lost As all businesses know , downtime is not just an annoyance . It can cause a detrimental impact to the company ’ s brand reputation as well as having a huge financial impact . The financial impact can vary depending on the nature of the business , but Gartner typically cites $ 5,600 per minute , which adds up to well over $ 300K per hour , meaning that every second does in fact count .
Businesses that can within minutes , restore any aspect of their IT infrastructure up to the last few seconds before an outage , will in an increasingly complex and challenging world have the competitive advantage and one less thing to worry about . For highly regulated industries , such as healthcare and financial services , this level of business continuity and highly granular disaster recovery helps them to easily exceed compliance requirements , while at the same time provide their customers with a much more seamless experience .
So , when it comes to keeping a business competitive , productive and establishing meaningful business continuity , the future is not in backup , its back in time . It is being able to go back in time to the second before the file was lost , deleted or infected . In the modern world where hackers , viruses and ever-mutating malware are the norm , getting access to a 12- hour old backup will soon be akin to trying to watch a movie on VHS : archaic , ineffective , useless and distracting ... n
Continuous recovery brings real continuity
Journalling the change Uninterrupted , continuous DR works by using compressed journalling of the changed blocks from the protected VMs . This produces a highly granular record of the data , which is incremented in seconds , over a two week period . The resulting journal enables point in time recovery with the ability to rewind data back in time , to recover from corruptions , deletions or even system wide disruptions due to ransomware or system upgrade errors . With ransomware attacks growing fast , a 24-hour old backup may be the least of your worries . The request by users to restore files is one of , if not the
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