Data Growth Tests Backup Capabilities

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Have you heard the big news? Data is growing at an insane pace. Ok ok, this isn’t really news, we all hear this almost every day. But what many people don’t realize is that one of the guiltiest culprits behind data growth is actually backup data.

Organizations today face numerous and consistently changing backup challenges As data grows and more data is needed to be stored and secure, companies today face numerous and evolving backup challenges.

Just a few years ago, organizations were primarily concerned with data protection, encryption and automation. This has changed as of lately with the rapid growth of data growth which has had a dramatic effect on what organizations are demanding from their backup solutions. Now, we’re seeing increased demand for:

• Continuous data protection
• Security and compliance
• Bare Metal Recovery(Recovering entire servers, including OS, files and configurations)
• Archiving
• Deduplication
• Reduced backup windows
• Faster recovery speeds

In fact, several publications have stated that worldwide annual data production has actually exceeded worldwide storage capacity. And the gap between the data that organizations produce and their ability to store it will only continue to grow in the years to come.

A number of trends are accelerating the growth rate for corporate data. Listed below are a few:

Cheaper Hardware – This is probably the most obvious place to start. Hard drive capacity has been falling exponentially in price.

Cheap and Abundant Bandwidth – Now that Internet bandwidth is no longer the bottleneck it once was, we’ve seen an explosion in the growth of streaming multimedia content. This bandwidth availability has also accelerated the growth of file sharing and online storage. Now, large files are being copied and distributed at an exponentially-growing scale, which has caused duplicate data to become a major source of storage waste and data growth. If one person shares a 1GB file with 500 people, that’s half a terabyte of storage consumption.

Business is Going Paperless – Email has replaced letters, eBooks and tablets have nearly replaced paper books, and digital imaging has replaced photographs and x-rays. Not only are paperless offices better for the environment, but they are also more productive, more flexible and better able to extract value from their business data.

The Growing Strategic Importance of Data – In the past, data was simply a tool which assisted in decision making and helped companies execute on their strategic objectives. Recently, headlines have increasingly been dominated by Google, Facebook, and other brands which have built their entire corporate strategy around the data they own. Information is power, and it’s now more powerful than ever.

Regulatory Compliance – Even if companies wanted to reduce the amount of data they store, they wouldn’t always be able to. Laws like HIPAA and many others are forcing companies to retain historical archives of their exponentially-growing business data going back several years. As this data grows, storage increasingly becomes a major business problem. Also, companies must plan for cost-efficient search and retrieval of these large historical data volumes in order to remain prepared for an unexpected electronic discovery request.

Not only is data growing exponentially, but the relative value of this data is also growing. As data grows in importance, it is critical to keep it safe as well.

To paraphrase Paul Simon, there are 50 ways to lose your data:

• A desktop/laptop hard drive crash or damage to your mobile device can render your data unrecoverable
• Your computer or phone can be stolen – business break-ins are common and according to FBI statistics 97% of stolen laptops/desktops are never recovered
• Data can be accidentally deleted (or deliberately deleted by a disgruntled employee)
• Your computer can be hijacked by malware
• Your online storage accounts can be hacked
• A ransomware attack could render your files inaccessible until a substantial fee is paid

That’s why many organizations are opting to outsource their data backups by partnering with experts who operate ahead of the trends and who can assist with the complexity of some situations. This way, they’ll be empowered to adapt more quickly to rapid changes in both the growth and the nature of the data they’re managing while also keeping the data safe and available.

11:11 Systems is a global cloud service provider of secure and compliant hosting for infrastructure (IaaS), disaster recovery (DRaaS) and backup as a service (BaaS). 11:11 Cloud Backup provides integrated, secure, and cost-effective protection for on-premises and cloud data, including Microsoft 365 data, to ensure critical business data is back online following a data loss event. With multiple layers of defense including security, cloud backup, and air-gapped Insider Protection, 11:11 Secure Cloud Backup can help organizations remove single points of failure to minimize the time and business impact of data loss. 11:11’s Cloud Backup offers an easy and cost-effective cloud solution for all offsite backup and archiving needs.

Don’t just take our word for it, learn more from one of our customers: Lush turns to 11:11 for comprehensive, cost effective Secure Cloud Backup.