There are various reasons why some organizations would not be interested in protecting their data. These reasons could range from the lack of financial resources to the lack of non-financial resources, such as engineers to implement a solution. Regardless of whether there is a good reason to not protect your data, the net result is the same: If organizations don’t do it and something bad happens, they will be in a world of hurt.
Data is the lifeblood of any business. It’s true that not all data is created equal, so some organizations may be comfortable losing some data. And it’s also true that there are some systems or applications that are built to not only tolerate data loss, but also seamlessly absorb the loss of data. The reality is that this is not 100 percent of the systems in your business, nor is it 100 percent of the data. If you were to completely lose the users table in your application or have it suffer from data corruption, how would you explain this situation to your customers? Can you realistically tell them that the money wasn’t there, or you didn’t have the resources to protect their data and yours? What type of trust would that instill in them for you as a provider of services? What type of trust would that instill in the business for your technology team?
For most businesses, data protection should be thought of as a component of the overall security strategy. If you wouldn’t set up a network infrastructure without a firewall for protection, why would you create an application without protecting the data that powers it?
Unfortunately, some form of system failure is inevitable. There will come a time when something bad happens. The best thing you can do is to be prepared as possible. Providing yourself with a safety net when this happens is doable, but shouldn’t be thought of as optional. There are some basics tenets that should be involved in providing a proper safety net. The most important of them is to plan for and failure and test your recovery procedures. This team education is your primary line of defense against disaster. It will help mitigate many of the potential failure scenarios through awareness. Data protection is for what happens when things get past this point. And protecting data should not be optional.
The implication of this is that requirements for data protection have changed forever, driven by this data-centric world (web-scale applications and distributed databases). Organizations are collecting vast amounts of data and seek to drive more value from that data to make better and faster business decisions. Most distributed and cloud databases already provide replication capability and thus satisfy the availability requirements of data protection. However, data protection requirements for scalable point-in-time backup and recovery need to be addressed. Without point-in-time backups, organizations are at substantial risk of losing data due to human error, logical corruption and other operational failures. Traditional backup solutions were built to address the requirements of relational databases that used shared storage and had the ACID transaction model. Unfortunately, they fall well short in addressing the point-in-time backup requirements of distributed databases (local storage, eventual consistency and the elastic nature of infrastructure).
