The inefficiencies and risks of backup processes

If cloud storage had existed decades ago, it’s unlikely that the industry would have developed
the backup processes that are commonly used today. However, the cloud didn’t exist, and IT teams had to come up with ways to protect data from a diverse number of threats, including large storms, power outages, computer viruses, and operator errors. That’s why vendors and IT professionals developed backup technologies and best practices, to make copies of data and store them off site in remote facilities where they could be retrieved after a disaster. A single “backup system” is constructed from many different components that must be implemented and managed correctly for backup to achieve its ultimate goal: the ability to restore the organization’s data after a disaster has destroyed it.

Many companies have multiple, sometimes incompatible, backup systems and technologies protecting different types of computing equipment. Many standards were developed over the years, prescribing various technologies, such as tape formats and communication interfaces, to achieve basic interoperability. Despite these efforts, IT teams have often had a difficult time recognizing the commonality between their backup systems. To many, it is a byzantine mess of arcane processes.

Technology obsolescence is another difficult aspect of data protection. As new backup storage technologies are introduced, IT teams have to manage the transition to those technologies as well as retain access to data across multiple technologies. This tends to be more problematic for long-term data archiving than backup, but it is a consideration that weighs on IT teams nonetheless.

Disaster recovery is the most stressful, complex undertaking in all of IT. Recreating replacement
systems from tape backups involves many intricate details that are very difficult to foresee and plan for. Doing this without the usual set of online resources is the ultimate test of the IT team’s skills—a test with a very high bar and no chance for a retry. Most IT teams do not know what their own recovery capabilities are; for example, how much data they could restore and how long it would take. When you consider how much time, money, and energy has been invested in backup, this is a sad state of affairs for the IT industry. Data growth is only making the situation worse.

Source of Information : Rethinking Enterprise Storage