What’s Wrong with Backup?

At nScaled, we talk to a lot of businesses about backup. Backup-as-a-service is one of the solutions we provide through our hybrid cloud infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS). Customers have a lot to say about their current backup solutions, and not much of it is positive. We’ve tried to provide a backup solution that solves the problems that they cite.

It turns out that the IT teams we talk to are pretty representative of the big picture. Frustration with tapes is well known, but other problems remain, even with disk based backup:

• the escalating cost of storage as amounts of data grow
• backup windows, no matter how short, are unrealistic in a 24×7 business world
• Recovery Point Objectives (RPO) of more than fifteen minutes are not acceptable – that’s too much data potentially lost
• Recovery Time Objectives (RTO) of more than fifteen minutes are also not acceptable – that’s too long to wait

Gartner writes,

“Organizations are voicing the opinion that backup needs to improve a lot, not just a little. This is leading to an increased willingness to switch backup vendors. The implication with the rising frustration with backup is that data protection approaches of the past may no longer suffice in meeting current, much less future, recovery requirements.” –  Best Practices for Addressing the Broken State of Backup, Gartner, 2010

Gartner goes on to describe how this is affecting the market for backup solutions: “By 2013, at least 20% of organizations will have changed their primary backup vendor due to frustration over cost, complexity and/or capability, up from the typical single-digit percentage shifts today.”

Wow, that’s a heck of a lot of turnover taking place!

So, what’s the answer?

What if backup weren’t a solution any more? What if backup were just a feature of a broader business continuity / disaster recovery (BC/DR) solution? And what if backup happened automatically, with no windows, no downtime, and RPO and RTO of 15 minutes or less?

I know, I know – you’re saying, “But DR is complex and expensive! We can’t get the executives to green-light the DR proposal we created, because of the cost.”

But what if a DR solution were the same price as backup, yet easier to implement? A real DR solution that not only lets you recover lost data, but also let’s you failover to fully functional servers that end-users can connect to and get back to work?

“Sounds too good to be true,” is the comments our sales guys hear the most often. But it is true. The convergence of virtualization, fast and secure WAN and decreasing hardware costs have made cloud backup real, and advanced snapshotting technologies have made backup-as-a-feature-of-DR real too.

Check it out.