Intelligent CIO Europe Issue 25 | Page 48

CIO opinion “ WORKING TOO MUCH OVERTIME, THE DEMOTIVATION OF A LOSS IN PRODUCTIVITY, OR THE DROP IN CONFIDENCE THAT COMES WITH A LACK OF INVESTMENT IN TRAINING – REQUIRE SWIFT ACTION AS PART OF A CIO STRATEGY. journal-based technology to keep a log of all the changes occurring in a specified timeframe, offering any point-in-time recovery in increments of seconds for the entire length of the journal. Conversely, incremental replication and snapshots put the business at risk of data loss, corruption and availability. What companies can utilise now is continuous journal-based recovery that provides granular recovery to within seconds of data that can go back seconds or multiple years as needed. The option to recover to many more granular points in time minimises data loss to seconds, dramatically reducing the impact of outages and disruptions to the business and its staff. • No performance impact: With CDP, the journal is only used until you commit to the point in time selected, without the performance impact of many snapshots. Storing multiple snapshots on replica VMs incurs a significant performance penalty when attempting to power on replica VMs. • Journal-based any point-in-time recovery: Journal-based recovery keeps a constant log of all the changes users make to applications and data. Because the changes are continuously written to the datastore, CDP delivers any point-in- time recoverability to within a specified time frame. • Enterprise scalability: The journal can be placed on any datastore with maximum size limits and warnings – preventing the datastore from filling which would otherwise break replication. Using snapshots on replicated VMs gives no way of controlling the total space used for snapshots, making them not scalable in terms of SLAs and efficiency. • Storage savings: CDP uses no extra space in the source storage as no snapshots are created. Only minimal additional storage on the target site is used which frees up significant amounts of space and results in dramatic savings. Snapshot technologies require significant overhead on the storage arrays, often requiring 20–30% at both the source and target. • Ransomware recovery down to the second: CDP delivers a continuous stream of recovery checkpoints available to use for recovery. In the event of ransomware or other malicious attacks, data can be recovered to just seconds before the corruption took place, minimising impact to the business and the brand. By moving from periodic, snapshot- based processes to a continuous process, enterprises can better meet today’s 24/7 demands of no data loss or downtime. Although, while it’s obviously important to think about how a tech-related disruption is going to impact a business financially, it is also important to think about how it’s going to impact the humans that have to deal with and recover from the disruption. Making sure all of your employees feel well-trained and confident on all technology platforms available to them, and making your IT department feel equipped and ready for any threat thrown its way – with the right tools to do just that – is going to save a lot of labour hours and keep employee morale high. These are all necessary for long-term employee retention, which goes hand- in-hand with recruiting top talent in your industry. Have you prepared for all angles of a disruption? n Benefits of protection with Continuous Data Protection • Real-time block-level replication: CDP utilises change-block tracking to constantly replicate data as it is written to storage. Because CDP is always-on, it offers considerably lower RPOs than snapshot-based solutions. 48 INTELLIGENTCIO www.intelligentcio.com