The road to data recovery, you might say, is paved with good intentions.
Most enterprises recognize the importance of protecting their data; nearly two in three (64%) rated data protection as critical to their success in a recent EMC poll. Yet enterprises are less than completely confident in their ability to recover from a data outage. The same poll found that 71% of enterprises were not “very confident” that they could fully recover from a data disruption in their business.
The reason that many enterprises lack confidence in their data protection strategies is the sheer size and complexity of data in their business. With the advent of big data, cloud-based data storage, and mobile applications, enterprises have more data in more places with little relief in sight. As enterprises become increasingly data-driven in the new mobile cloud economy, they need faster access to data to support analytics, new industry compliance requirements, and customer-facing applications.
Tellingly, the windows for recovery time objectives (the time in which enterprises need to recover their data before it seriously impacts business operations) and recovery point objectives (the point in time from which data should be restored) are shrinking as enterprises rely more on data. To satisfy this new requirement for shorter RTOs and RPOs, enterprises are backing up more data more often.
This has had a negative impact on IT systems, in large part because of uncontrolled data duplication. Enterprises today have too much of the same data in different locations, which is driving up cost and driving down efficiency.
One way that enterprises can reduce data complexity and cost is through data deduplication. By analyzing data across the enterprise, removing redundant data entries, and creating logical links to that data, data deduplication technologies are reducing enterprise storage footprints by 200% to 800% and accelerating data recovery times.
There are, as you might imagine, different approaches to data deduplication, and not all of them offer the same benefits. In our experience, we’ve found that a strong data deduplication strategy is one that includes the following features:
- Native integration of data deduplication technology into the core storage architecture. This allows the storage solution to scale more efficiently and reduce the performance problems that can result from non-native deduplication.
- Continuous fault detection and healing. Some data deduplication solutions only scan a portion of your data on a recurring basis, which exposes enterprises to potentially longer RPOs.
- Flexibility to choose from multivendor backup solutions. Choosing a data deduplication solution shouldn’t lock you into using that vendor’s backup solution as well.
- Daily full backups. Daily incremental backups allow enterprises to fully back up their data every time, eliminating the need for those dreaded monthly or quarterly data backup marathons.
- Seamless support for enterprise– and cloud-based data. The ability to protect and restore data that exists in one or multiple cloud locations is essential for enterprises that have adopted or plan to adopt hybrid cloud technologies.
EMC’s Data Protection Suite provides these features (and many more), making it an excellent choice for enterprises that need a high-performance data recovery solution without the high cost of storing multiple copies of the same data.
As an EMC partner, Rolta AdvizeX can help enterprises achieve full confidence in their data protection strategies with expert consulting and managed services that include complete assessment of the business environment, solution planning and design, data migration, disaster recovery, storage systems selection and implementation (including Flash, hyperconverged, and traditional storage systems), and maintenance.
To find out how data deduplication can stop your enterprise from seeing double the recovery time and double the cost, talk to Rolta AdvizeX today. ▪