Backup and Recovery – There is no doubt in saying that with more data exposure over digital mediums, our data is more prone to vulnerabilities. With the obsoletion of handwritten and typed literature, digital copies of data are more preferred. With this, our data is forced to reside in the digital yet third party caretakers such as in the remote servers or the cloud servers.
Cyberattack is one of the most catastrophic threats to our digital modes of communication and data storage mediums. It just takes one cyber-attack and all of our data will be lost. Even if we are safe from any kind of cyber-attack but still what is the guarantee that no theft or hardware malfunction will harm our important data. In these scenarios, managed backup and data recovery plans can save us from any such calamity.
Generally, backup is the process of storing copies of our important data on some storage mediums, such as on tape drive, USB drive, cloud storage and remote data centers. Furthermore, recovery is the restoration of backup data to either original location or to any such place which can be used as an alternative in case of data loss or corruption.
Scope and Future of Backup and Recovery
Over time, data protection has become the main concern of any IT infrastructure. There has been exponential growth in the need for the provision of security to data. Especially when a lot of data is being parked in cloud storage. There are a lot of companies and individuals who store sensitive information and confidential data on their computer systems. In this situation, the need for protecting such vital data is increasing as this sensitive and confidential shouldn’t be accessed by the thieves or hackers.
According to the statistics, there were 28 million IT professionals, all over the world in 2014. This number is expected to grow aggressively and there is anticipation which says that by 2020, there will be 36 million IT professionals worldwide. With the perspective of the IT industry, this number is overwhelming, but the problem is that the amount of data is growing at a much higher rate. As per the research was done back in 2014, It was said that each IT professional was responsible for 230GB of data, on average. However, by 2020 this number is expected to reach the mark of 1231GB.
With these statistics, the popularity of hyper-converged storage makes sense. Hyper-convergence systems are defined as the system-defined scale-out architectures which intend to integrate the computer, network and storage mediums through virtualization.
In this way, it can be said that the scope of backup also lies in the hyper-convergence. In the future, if we intend to cope up with future needs, then we need to make the architecture of our backup appliance in lieu with the hyper-convergence paradigm. For instance, servers, networks, storage, operating systems and backup software will need to comprehend the benefits of much faster processors, memories, backplane and input/output operations.
In the future, flash-based architectures will become more abundant and popular. It will not happen just to make backup and recovery processes faster, instead they’ll intend to increase the overall functionality of the system. In this perspective, there is a need to make backup sets and recovery appliances more capable and highly functional.
The future lies in the augmentation of the core functions of data protection such as backup, deduplication, private replication and recovery. It can then be anticipated that instant recovery will become so instant that it will be far beyond the hardware and software capabilities of today’s backup and recovery infrastructures.
Cloud-based backups, whether public or private, will continue to grow in the future. This growth will not just be due to the attractive storage target, instead, it is anticipated that it will be a useful tool to be used as Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS).
As more and more people are choosing cloud computing as their prospective backup solution, there is a need for the incorporation of definitive or point in time recovery time objectives and recovery point objectives in the cloud backups. Future backup and recovery plans are expected to be broader in terms of data recovery and backup. For example, it is said that in the future, B&R plans will be able to backup and recover data from multiple cloud platforms, including emails. These plans will become so intelligent that they will even suggest the best backup method. For instance, future B&R plans will be able to suggest that in the current situation whether incremental backups would prove beneficial or differential backups should be applied. In this way, not only the system become intelligent, but it will also be capable to monitor the hardware failures, operating system issues and error in the application layers.
With this, it can be predicted that future data backup technologies will be highly modular. Although companies are not preferring on-site data backups anymore. But still, such on-site resources will continue to exist for the next ten years.
Future backup and recovery systems have been envisioned with such user interface which can simplify the tasks. But at the same time, it should be capable enough to achieve the complexity of the task. Future backup and recovery mediums should provide the user with auto-discovery of required actions and their interdependence.
Final Note
The scope of backup and recovery is so vast that there has been continuous research and development regarding future backup and recovery plans. Research is being carried out on the ways to make B&R plans more effective as well as to know the scope to which B&R plans can go on. The scope of backup and recovery for the business continuity is highly dependent on the trends in the IT sector, especially those concerning with the data.
