The logic behind the inadequacies of traditional backup

The fact is this: Traditional backup methods, today, are completely inadequate. Many business owners won’t even consider the backup methods of yesterday (such as tapes and disks) and are moving toward Disaster Recovery, which provides technologically advanced backup of your organization’s data in the event of a failure, and minimizes costly downtime. With Disaster Recovery you know your data is continually protected, storage secured, and provided with immediate data recovery. Recovery time and write speeds are faster, backup is reliable, downtime is significantly reduced, there’s little human intervention required and the money saved is substantial.

Take a look at these significant differences between traditional backup and Disaster Recovery:

Recovery Time
Traditional backup: With legacy backup technologies like tape, downtime is prolonged, since a full recovery can take days or weeks.

Disaster Recovery: Downtime after a disaster is reduced to hours, minutes, or even seconds.

Human Error
Traditional backup: High risk of backup and recovery failure from human error since frequent manual intervention is required. 58% of downtime is a result of human error. [1]

Disaster Recovery: Fully automated backup process means very little manual management required.

Verification
Traditional backup: Difficult to test if backup is working properly.

Disaster Recovery: Automated screenshots are taken of each image-based backup, then emailed to user, to verify a successful backup was made.

Hybrid Cloud
Traditional backup: Data backups are at risk when based only in one location, either local or in the cloud.

Disaster Recovery: Data backups stored in both local device and secure cloud will mitigate downtime, as businesses can run off the local device or the cloud.

Backup Speed
Traditional backup: Legacy systems like tape have slow write speeds. Slow backups mean fewer backups per day and an inferior recovery point objective (RPO).

Disaster Recovery: Modern backup hardware gives you high-performance networking, and reliable, high-speed hard disk and solid-state drives. Faster backups means you have more intermediate points to recover from.

Instant Virtualization
Traditional backup: Converting backups to bootable virtual machines is time-consuming and error prone, meaning longer recovery times.

Disaster Recovery: Incremental backups can be instantly virtualized, rather than the entire backup chain.

Redundancy
Traditional backup: Time consuming and expensive to make copies of, or store, backups in multiple locations. 61% of SMBs still ship tapes to an off-site location. [2]

Disaster Recovery: Each image-based backup is automatically saved as a VMDK, in both local device and secure cloud.

Compliance
Traditional backup: Limited options for encrypting data, may not pass industry regulations (i.e. HIPAA, SOX).

Disaster Recovery: AES 256 and SSL key-based encryption ensures data is safe and meets industry regulations.

Reliability
Traditional backup: When recovering data, tape failure rates exceed 50%.

Disaster Recovery: Minimal risk of corrupted backups or data loss.

Security
Traditional backup: Potential for theft of loss of media.

Disaster Recovery: Off-site backups stored in SSAE 16 data centers.

Cost
Traditional backup: Perceived cost savings are deceiving when you consider the average cost of downtime is $163,674 per hour. [3]

Disaster Recovery: The ability to keep your business running in the event of disaster has immeasurable value.

If your system experiences a failure, you’re facing a lengthy, costly, and complicated recovery.  Don’t wait for a system failure to happen before you figure out your recovery doesn’t have to be that complicated. Make that transition out of traditional backups and secure your system’s future with Disaster Recovery – your data depends on it. [4]

TeraGo is there to help you along the way
Get in touch with us so that our experts can guide you all the way from a Disaster Recovery assessment to solution design, implementation, maintenance & testing and should you ever require a fully managed recovery, using leading edge technologies on our fully owned and managed cloud infrastructure. Call 1-800-TeraGo-1 (837-24651)

[1] “Enterprise Data and the Cost of Downtime,” IOUG, July 2012

[2] Information Week

[3] Aberdeen Group

[4] www.dcgla.com

About Contributor:

Brent Whitfield is the CEO of DCG Technical Solutions Inc. DCG provides the specialist advice and IT support Los Angeles businesses need to remain competitive and productive, despite their often limited IT infrastructure expenditure. Brent has been featured in Fast Company, CNBC, Network Computing, Reuters, and Yahoo Business. https://www.dcgla.com was recognized among the Top 10 Fastest Growing MSPs in North America by MSP mentor. Twitter: @DCGCloud.