What is Continuous Data Protection (CDP)? Data is an important assets in enterprise that can help business growth and improvement. Today, the increasingly interconnected business environment results in the generation of vast amount of data, making organisation to become exposed to bigger threats and vulnerabilities. Subsequently, poor data protection may lead to devastating impacts to business. Hence, organisations are in need of Continuous Data Protection or in short CDP as an effective solution.
Continuous Data Protection (CDP) is also known as continuous backup. According to an Article in Journal of Systems Integration written by Mugoh, Leon & Ateya, Ismail & Shibwabo, Bernard. (2011), CDP can be defined as a methodology that continuously captures or tracks data modifications and stores changes independent of the primary data, which then enables instant recovery from any non-predetermined point-in-time. Simply put, CDP is a solution that constantly records and stores data changes separately and then allows instant recovery of system at any point-in-time.
The type of CDP is based on the Recovery Point Objective (RPO) – the maximum acceptable amount of data measured in the amount of time that can be lost from the point-in-time or data loss event. There are two types of CPD which are:
1. Near CDP – refers to data protection method that perform periodic data recovery at very short time intervals. Data that is recovered through near CDP is not equal to the actual number of data specifically the newly modified data. However, near CDP can recover data to any second in time and provide tolerable data recovery that is acceptable to organisation. For near CDP, the acceptable RPO is higher than zero or in the range between scheduled backup.
2. True CDP – refers to data protection recovery method that backs up data modification continuously. The acceptable RPO for true CDP is zero where organisation achieve complete data recovery after an incident.
All in all, Continuous Data Protection (CDP) is essential in Business Continuity Plan as it ensure that data can be continuously recovered during downtime or data loss incident.
E-SPIN has been actively involved in assist 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 being 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. The Benefits of Business Continuity Plan
2. Availability and Business Continuity Solutions
