Data is a vital asset to the modern organisation today. Any data loss event may lead to disrupting impact to organisation. Significantly, every organisation need to have a data backup solution which is an exercise that involves copying data from a primary location to a secondary location to keep them protected from various vulnerabilities and malicious actions. Nevertheless, regardless of the the amount of data being generated continue to increase exponentially as the modern organisation adopts more technology to expand their business, the data backup system has to be running as smoothly and effectively. Thus, Continuous Data Protection (CDP) or also known as continuous data backup had become an important implementation in organisation. How does Continuous data protection work?
The emergence of Continuous Data Protection
Primarily, traditional backup being practiced by most organisation is by running a nightly tape backup. The practice however have many drawbacks where the major problems being shrinking backup windows and increasing exposure to vulnerabilities. Continuous data protection was invented and introduced as a solution for these drawbacks.
How does Continuous Data Protection work?
First and foremost, the data that can be recovered by CDP system include:
- Databases (Database files & Database logs)
- Emails in mailboxes
- Files
- Folders
- Application data
Any modification made on the data is called by the term ‘delta’. In an organisation, ‘delta’ is commonly being backed up to the disk or being saved to drive on computer and modified with times as business process continues. These data are known as the initial copy.
Continuous Data Protection (CDP) works by replicating the ‘delta’ from the initial data copy and record every single write and store it in a changelog (‘log’ of all substantial modification made to a computer) on the CDP system. CDP system is capable in detecting every change made to your data as it runs in the background. Therefore, when there are changes made to the data, the CDP system will immediately copy the changes in the master backup file. CDP system takes multiple snapshots of each file on different dates to allow them to be retrieved at any point-in-time thus, any data loss right before downtime event are able to be restored with CDP.
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?
4. The Benefits of Business Continuity Plan
5. Availability and Business Continuity Solutions