Since backup and replication are inseparable, companies increasingly need to combine these two elements to achieve their RTO and enable business continuity. Today, enterprise data centers are becoming increasingly complex, process volumes of data that are growing exponentially and are extremely solicited, resulting in the need for a very solid management strategy. The choice of technology is important for risk prediction.

We consider the risks described in this article are eliminated when the 3-2-1 rule is applied, that is to say, keep 3 copies of your data (including a production data set) on 2 different media types, 1 of which is located off-site.

1. Loss or corruption of data

With replication, whether in the form of versioning, continuous data protection (CDP), deduplication or "images",  the integrity of data can be ensured without disrupting or slowing down the production environment.

Replication solutions centralize reports in dashboards and assess the recoverability of environments according to the  governance rules and requirements set out by the company. This is the best guarantee to having optimal data for restoration and recovery. According to a study by ESG, in a virtualized environment, the two main concerns of managers are validating the success of replications and of recoveries (equal to 44% of respondents)

If we compare it with the backup on tapes or disks, the number of recovery points with replication is significantly higher because the number of versions is higher.

2. Unattained RTO / RPO 

The RTO (Recovery Time Objective) and RPO (Recovery Point Objective) defined in the service level agreements must be respected to avoid financial and reputational losses and penalties. These two indicators are optimized by real-time replication, which nowadays can easily achieve an RPO of about 15 minutes in some cases.  As well the automatic recovery, preconfigured, follows the optimal sequence for the resumption of operations .

While the restoration of an environment from tape can be a puzzle where all steps must be done manually, putting in place an automatic failover solution eliminates these burdens and the associated sources of errors. Automating the renewal of operations permits the control of the entire process from the integrated dashboard, lowering the time to restart processes and services, which achieves the defined RTO without having to be in crisis management mode.

Our take