What is Data Protection?

What is Data Protection?

Thursday, July 31st, 2008

In the past few months, our team worked tirelessly to prepare for the big launch on July 7. A new shopping cart, a new site design, a new managed hosting division, new advanced services … you know, the little things. I joined the team in the midst of this development and promptly made a contribution: We shouldn't have a product line called Backup.

Bye Bye Backup? Absolutely Not.

Backups are infinitely valuable to all hosting customers, so I would never suggest that we eliminate the solutions enabling the backup of data. However, there is more to protecting data than just backing it up. Our goal, is to provide clarity around these data protection options so that our customers can select the best one for their company, that protects their data the way they need it protected. The data protection landscape can be pretty confusing, so it's important for us to clarify where our products fit in the midst of all these hardware and software solutions that enable you to create and maintain full backups, partial backups, incremental backups, automated backups, disk images, and just about any other copy of data that you can imagine.

Data Protection

The goal of our data protection product line is simple: to protect customers' data from accidental deletion or hardware/application failure. Each solution in the product line offers a different means to that end, so we renamed the product portfolio to better reflect the products' goal. The Data Protection category encompasses traditional backup, continuous data protection, bare metal recovery and some disaster recovery abilities - and you'll be seeing more products and services added soon.

Why do I need data protection? Doesn't my storage protect my data?

Storage products generally have some level of data protection built in, such as RAID on disk arrays, and other redundant hardware and software features such as snapshots. These features protect your data from several types of events like component hardware failure in the device or if the data is corrupted by a user or application. So, yes, the storage system will protect your data – but not against every possibility, such as the device itself losing utility power or network connectivity. At that point, a copy of the data on another device — or better yet in another data center — is required. Designing a data protection strategy that solves the wide range of potential problems at an affordable price point can be a challenge.