Today, organisations are facing various challenges in keeping up with the rapidly increasing amount of accumulated data. Significantly, every organisation needs data backup as an essential step to protect themselves from all factors that may lead to data loss. Alas, the traditional data backup method that had been applied by organisations over the years is beginning to show incompetency as it become slower in providing data backup. Subsequently, Continuous Data Protection or in short CDP which was first introduced to address reducing backup windows had brought into the limelight as an extended backup solution for the existing traditional backup practice. Nevertheless, CDP offers a better solution but not an ideal one. Therefore, what are the advantages and disadvantages of continuous data protection?
Continuous Data Protection is primarily designed as a system that continuously journal data changes every time the changes is made. This practice gives many advantages to organisations which include:
1. No virtual data loss
CDP system conducts constant data syncing making you to recover data from any point in time. Therefore, in a system failure event, you will be able to recover the required data virtually in real-time.
2. Version controls
CDP makes multiple version of backup to your data. This allows you to roll back to any version needed and recover data to any date in time. This is advantageous when you are working in collaboration where every user is able to get back their data to the state they are working on at the time of data loss incident.
3. Saves disk space
CDP works by detecting and replicating only the modified data. The unaffected, data other hand is theoretically recycled over and over again, making the lesser amount of disk space being used through CDP.
4. Improve disaster recovery (DR)
Disaster recovery can be defined as the strategy or practice implemented by an organisation in recovering IT access and functionalities after disruption which include, nature disaster, cyberattacks, human errors, power outage and many more. As CDP backup store can be copied repeatedly to an offsite data storage center, it plays a crucial role in disaster recovery as it helps protect data for physical harm.
While Continuous Data Protection (CDP) offers many benefits in helping organisation secure their data, it is as well brings about several disadvantages or challenges. What are the disadvantages of CDP?
1. Higher cost for high performance
CDP requires fast disk drive to offer fast performance. This lead to increase cost as organisation need to invest in physical disk storage.
2. Single point of failure
Commonly, CDP involves the use of server to save data. Therefore, this method will become a drawback as the server may become the single point of failure which in turn become harmful to your data as well as your system.
3. Increases load on data resources
As CDP backup data instantly and constantly in real-time, it is essentially doubles the data throughput. This makes the load on data resources heavier thus lead to performance issue.
E-SPIN has been actively involved in assisting enterprise and government agencies customer on the business continuity, disaster recovery (BCDR), and mission critical system run in cluster, fault tolerant and failover/failback project and operation requirement since 2005, as a part of E-SPIN Availability Management solution. Feel free to contact E-SPIN for your specific operation or project requirement, so we can assist you on the exact requirement in the packaged solutions that you may require for your operation or project needs.
Other posts you might be interested in:
1. What is Continuous Data Protection (CDP)?
2. Why There is Need for Continuous Data Protection (CDP)?
3. How does CDP solve traditional backup challenges?
