A lot of people think that the concepts of Backup and Data Protection are the same.
True or not true ?
Read this blog and you will learn that there are several differences between these 2 concepts.
Start with some definitions :
- Backup : It is traditionally about an operational task. Have you already heard some recommendation like : "your device needs to be regularly backed up", which is a part of best practice for all IT managers. It is about recovery time for being back online and mostly it is focus on computers, servers.
- Data protection : It is evolving along two parts: data availability and data management. Data availability ensures users have a copy of the data they need to continue their business even if the data is corrupted or lost.
Know more about Data Protection
Today, we can go further in the explanation about the concept of data management used in data protection: the data lifecycle management. Data lifecycle management is the process of automating the movement of critical data from main production storage to offline secondary storage. The strategy is to value the asset in cataloging and protecting these contents from user errors, ransomware, system failure or facility outages and disruptions.
More recently, data management provides solution to unlock business values :
- Reports dormant copies of data
- Meta data management
- Analytics
- ...
In summary
- Backup is about making sure you can rebuild your server in case of main lose of services.
- Data Protection is about protecting your valuable assets and make sure that you have different copies of these contents into different storage system online or offline.
Now you understand that these 2 concepts are different and complementary. The main differences between these two terms have to do with the mindset and approach they represent.
We see that most of organizations have well designed backup infrastructure but for data protection it is mostly ignored !
After having read this blog post, I'm sure you have in mind this question :
- How organized is our Data Protection ?
- How do we protect our core business information in our organization ?