Over the past five years, backup vendors big and small have released dozens of surveys about the state of data protection, and they generally all show the same situation. The cost of downtime is growing, with businesses losing millions of dollars a year, and most organizations are still not confident their current solution will be able to reliably back up and recover data fast enough to meet their service level agreements.
Even worse, the situation is growing worse over time. For example, the Veeam Availability Reports from 2015 through 2017 show the average annual cost of unplanned downtime to a business more than doubled from $10 million in 2015 to $21.8 million in 2017.
Customer confidence in their backup solutions also hasn’t improved significantly. According to Veeam, 85% of their 2017 respondents were less than “very confident” in their ability to protect and recover data. Similarly, a March 2019 Dell EMC report found that 84% “think their data protection solution will not enable them to meet all future business challenges.”
To us, this data calls into question the efficacy of traditional software solutions for protecting and recovering data, and demonstrates the desperate need within enterprise IT to achieve backup independence.Tired of babysitting your backups? Read how to achieve Backup Independence!
Backup software is the problem
No enterprise today deploys storage without also ensuring the data is protected from accidental deletion, corruption, hardware failure or ransomware attack. So why should they be separate systems? Bolting backup software or data protection appliances onto existing storage introduces complexity and often requires additional personnel in the form of backup administrators to manage it, which adds to the cost of backup.
And costs go even higher when you consider how IT will store all of those backups. The 3-2-1 rule is commonly cited as best practice. It requires at least three copies of all data on two different types of media with at least one stored offsite. Adherence to this rule gets pricey fast.
Tape is cheap, but it increases the amount of time it takes to recover data, leading to huge RTOs (recovery time objectives). Disk provides far better performance, but it increases cost, especially if IT wants highly reliable storage for critical backups. And while many organizations have started using the cloud as a simple, inexpensive way to get backups offsite, unless they’re leveraging edge computing to improve performance, recovery will be extremely slow due to the large distances between public cloud facilities and enterprise data centers. And, of course, there will be egress fees to pay when retrieving cloud data.
Finally, traditional backup solutions are not meeting enterprise expectations. According to the Dell EMC report, only 8% of respondents were very confident they could meet backup and recovery SLOs (service level objectives), comply with governmental regulations and fully recover in the event of a disaster or cyberattack.
There is a better way.
Watch a Webinar with Storage Switzerland’s George Crump, in which he explains how to achieve Backup Independence.
Backup independence
The solution is backup independence. Fundamentally, this means that IT shouldn’t have to think about data protection until it comes time to recover – and it should be a seamless operation. To accomplish this, backup and disaster recovery should be automated as an integral part of any storage system or service. Backup should happen frequently behind the scenes without affecting the performance of the production environment in order to provide a recovery point objective (RPO) of near-zero.
Likewise, recovery should be fast, with RTOs measured in minutes, not hours or days, and all backups should be encrypted, with multiple copies stored in multiple locations while maintaining a single, durable copy of data that’s accessible anywhere.
With ClearSky, customer data is protected as soon as it enters the ClearSky service, providing customers immediate peace of mind and more importantly, a single, durable copy of their data. In the background, data is protected in the data center, at the edge and in multiple locations in the cloud - enabling near-instantaneous recovery. All data stored is encrypted in transit and at rest, with only the customer controlling the encryption keys.
Finally, there are never any additional charges for complete data protection with ClearSky. Customers only pay for useable storage in the service – backups are built-in, the need for replication is eliminated, and we don’t charge egress fees to access data from the cloud, ever.
With backup independence, you can save money (ClearSky customers typically save at least 50% on their total cost of storage – check out our TCO calculator), reduce complexity and improve your RTOs and RPOs – and, best of all, you don’t have to babysit or, really, even think about backup at all.
But don’t take our word for it. The best advocates for backup independence are our customers. As Ken Adams, CIO of the law firm Miles & Stockbridge, said: "Implementing this type of solution takes away the headaches of a backup solution.”
Interested in learning more? Watch a recent ActualTech Ecocast with ClearSky’s Darren Miller on Disaster Recovery in the Cloud. Or sign up for a demo to see for yourself!
