It is arguably time for enterprises to seriously consider giving tape the boot.
So says Bradley Janse van Rensburg, chief technology officer at ContinuitySA, who notes that in a business environment where CIOs must play an increasingly strategic role, broken backups shouldn't be clamouring for their attention.
A recent EMC survey discovered that South African organisations are spending over half a billion rand per year on tape for backup, which is an outdated solution. However, it found that 82% of organisations using tape in SA would like to move away from tape mainly to boost the speed of data recovery and system restores; faster backups; durability; improved deduplication; and greater reliability from automatic error, among other factors.
"We're finding that more and more companies are looking for fully managed and monitored backup solutions delivered by a specialist service provider, and which don't use tape as the storage medium," Janse van Rensburg says.
"Traditional tape backups are not only unreliable, they are also extremely difficult to scale. They also do not easily adapt to new technologies which became apparent when IT environments began to be virtualised."
Speedy backups
Ideally, he adds, such solutions should comprise an onsite 'near line' backup and recovery vault at each major premise, synchronised to a remote recovery site.
"Because most restore requests are submitted within 48 hours of a data loss, the onsite facility is very convenient, and as it uses the existing local area network, backups and restores are very speedy," notes Janse van Rensburg.
He also points out that the onsite backup vault should be a purpose-built appliance that can scale easily as well as integrate with new technologies. It should be designed to check the integrity of backups, and compress and de-duplicate data, he says.
Moving to the offsite facility, Janse van Rensburg says it is necessary to ensure good connectivity.
"Providing the right kind of bandwidth is essential to ensure that backups can be completed as scheduled and replicated offsite quickly, with full encryption across the whole process. It's important that the recovery site has the necessary server infrastructure on which to perform the restore, and also to provide workstations for employees in the event of a major disaster," he explains.
For those companies seeking to improve their backup regime, Janse van Rensburg has some further advice. "When selecting your solution provider, make sure that you get user-friendly dashboards and reports to maintain oversight. Meet regularly to ensure that your backup strategy remains aligned with your overall IT and business continuity strategies. But above all - make sure your backups aren't left to chance."
Backup regime challenges
Janse van Rensburg argues that despite common knowledge of the value of data, many companies still struggle to establish a backup regime that adequately protects their information.
He believes some executives and heads of IT departments are frustrated by, and even deeply mistrustful of, the official tape-based backup processes, giving rise to a sprawling ad hoc 'accidental architecture' of duplicate backup procedures.
It's an unnecessarily costly and risky situation that allows gaps to appear and severely affects the integrity of data protection and it shouldn't be allowed to prevail, Janse van Rensburg says.
"This is a problem that manifests itself in general staff and even executive staff creating their own backups by making copies of important documents on public cloud storage services, external hard drives, flash drives and even their home PCs," he adds.
"Furthermore, it's not uncommon for database administrators to make a complete copy of their database each night in addition to the official tape backup."
The same is true of mail, document management, virtualisation and other administrators. "The end result is a mess of backups of backups and massive growth of data stored on expensive primary storage systems," adds Bradley.
According to Janse van Rensburg, not only is the practice costly, it is also risky, with shortcomings and protection gaps a practical inevitability in the somewhat random approach to backups. When it comes to tape-based backups, there's a further common problem, too, he notes.
"Research from EMC reveals that 34% of South African companies are not sending their backups offsite at all, presumably due to the difficulty in working with multiple backup sets and concern for the safety of their data in transit. ContinuitySA's experience is that many corporations and government agencies don't follow this basic procedure, which seriously compromises their ability to recover from the loss of an inability to access their facilities," continues Bradley.
He says the quality of tape backups is also often suspect. "We've seen 10% to 25% of all backup jobs failing before they are even moved offsite. Even when a backup job appears successful, it is very rarely verified."
With the point of a backup being the ability to restore data, failed backups and unverified backups render the whole process moot, he warns.
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