What is Continuous Data Protection (CDP)?

Continuous data protection (CDP) provides granular recovery to within seconds of data that can go back seconds or years as needed. The option to recover to many more granular points in time minimizes data loss to seconds, dramatically reducing the impact of outages and disruptions to your organization.  

What is Continuous Data Protection (CDP)?

Continuous data protection (CDP), alternatively called continuous backup, is a type of backup that makes a copy of every change in data at the exact moment it occurs. With CDP in place, organizations don’t have to worry about backup windows or recovery point objectives because backup is being done instantly, on the fly. Like a methodical archivist, CDP always watches and notes everything in your system. Given such a detailed record, you can quickly and effortlessly undo any damage and get back to the point when everything worked perfectly.

Suppose a mission-critical file gets corrupted or infected with malware. Traditionally, you would need to roll back an entire backup to restore the file to its functioning state. Continuous backup enables you to target and restore that file without performing a full recovery.

Why is CDP important?

Continuous data protection is critical to protecting always-on applications. In each business, some applications are considered mission-critical and cannot afford to go down even for brief periods. A continuous data protection solution ensures that in the case of an unforeseen event, failure, cyberattack, or outage, the backed-up copy of application data is served up near-instantly to keep operations running.

A robust continuous data protection solution helps organizations achieve near-zero data loss and the ability to recover their data seconds before the disaster struck.

How does it work?

After creating an initial full backup of your data, continuous data protection operates in the background, making note of every subsequent change within a specified time frame and storing it in a journal file. By recording all the changes up to a failure, you’ll be able to review the log and easily roll your system back to the point you desire.

The automatic, continual recording of changes gives you the flexibility of recovering data to a much more granular degree than other backup methods that restore to a previous point in time.

Some vendors offer products with near-continuous data protection, such as Microsoft. Continuous data protection features in the Microsoft System Center Data Protection Manager, for example, operate much like snapshot backups and don’t deliver true hypervisor-based continuous data protection.

What type of data do CDPs protect?

CDP systems can support any type of enterprise data, but are commonly used to protect the following:

• System files, such as server operating systems and configurations.
• Application files or the programs that the enterprise uses.
• Application data or the information applications create and use.
• System management data, such as server and platform logs and metrics collection.
• Database and data management systems and files.

Data protection technologies, including CDP and more traditional backup methods, are designed to guard long-lived or business-critical data that might be needed for months or even years. CDP isn’t well-suited to short-lived data types or use cases where data changes frequently. It’s also not useful with data that becomes obsolete quickly, such as internet of things data, or carries little tangible business value, such as machine learning training data sets. CDP is used where needed to protect specific valuable business apps and data assets with quick recovery.

Benefits of Continuous Data Protection

• Improved Data Recovery: CDP allows for the recovery of data to any point in time, significantly reducing the risk of data loss.
• Lower Recovery Time Objectives (RTO): With CDP, data can be restored quickly, minimizing downtime in the event of data loss or corruption.
• Enhanced Security: Continuous backups mean that data is less vulnerable to cyber threats, as there are always recent backups to recover from.
• Simplified Management: CDP solutions often come with management tools that simplify the process of monitoring backups and performing recoveries.

The disadvantages

• Legacy backups: Legacy backups are relatively simple. The technology is well-established and understood, and its hardware requirements are modest. Continuous data protection, on the other hand, constantly generates I/O on your storage devices. You need to be prepared to invest more money in hardware that can keep up with the amount of data you’re pushing to it. The biggest potential disadvantage, therefore, is that your legacy backup hardware is not fast enough to ingest data adequately.
• Synthetic fulls: In addition to the I/O generated by backing up, synthetic fulls generate considerable I/O as they piece together incremental and build a new full backup. Legacy systems don’t have anything like the synthetic full, so they’re not equipped to deal with the spike in I/O. However, the architecture of a properly configured continuous data protection system includes software and hardware that account for that.

Continuous Data Protection vs Traditional Backup

CDP effectively solves the biggest challenges associated with traditional backups. Most notably, CDP eliminates the backup window. Whereas traditional backups often back up data at the file level, CDP is a block-level technology. As such, CDP immediately backs up any newly created or modified storage blocks. This effectively eliminates the need for a nightly backup window.

CDP also helps address traditional backup challenges by reducing the RPO. A traditional nightly backup occurs once every 24 hours, and any data created since the time of the most recent backup is potentially subject to loss. If an organization’s nightly backup completes at midnight and there is a major data loss event at noon, then any data created between midnight and noon will be lost. In contrast, CDP platforms back up data almost immediately, meaning that an organization would never lose more than a few minutes’ worth of data.

Summary

Continuous data protection is a very popular feature for large and scaling organizations. Some professionals might even classify it as a must-have when it comes to protecting their company’s sensitive data.

The more data a business accumulates over the years, the more a continuous data protection backup makes sense. With low storage space and the ability to recover data from minutes, hours, days, and weeks ago, CDP is a great option for anyone looking for airtight security that doesn’t eat up disk space.

It’s a no-brainer that data security should be an integral part of any business. Security software comes in all shapes and sizes, all designed to secure all types of data no matter the size.