Data protection requires — backups from which you can restore them. For most companies and organizations, data backup is among the top priorities. About half of companies treat their data as a strategic asset. And the value of stored data is constantly growing. They are used to improve the quality of customer service, support current activities, research and development, accounting, they are involved in automation systems, the Internet of things, artificial intelligence, etc. Therefore, the task of protecting data from hardware failures, human errors, viruses and cyber attacks becomes extremely relevant.
The world is experiencing an increase in cybercrime. Last year, more than 70% of companies were subjected to cyberattacks. Compromise of personal data of clients and confidential files can have serious consequences and lead to huge losses.
At the same time, a culture of working with data is emerging, an understanding that data is a valuable resource with which a company can earn additional profit or reduce costs, and with it, a desire to ensure reliable protection of their data.
There are several backup options: local or remote storage of backups on your own site, cloud storage or backups from hosting providers.
Keep and protect
Survey results show that about a quarter of respondents back up data monthly, the same number on a weekly basis, and more than a quarter on a daily basis. And rightly so: as a result of this foresight, almost 70% of organizations avoided downtime due to data loss last year. In this they are helped by improving software tools and services.
According to IDC of the global data protection replication software market (Data Replication and Protection), its sales in the world will grow by 2018% annually from 2022 to 4,7 and will reach 8,7 billion dollars. DecisionDatabases.com analysts in their report () came to the conclusion that in the next five years, the average annual growth rate of the global data backup software market will be 7,6%, and in 2024 its volume will reach 2,456 billion dollars against 1,836 billion dollars in 2019.
In October 2019, Gartner introduced the Magic Quadrant for data center IT backup and recovery software. The leading vendors of this software are Commvault, Veeam, Veritas, Dell EMC and IBM.
At the same time, the popularity of cloud backup is growing: sales of such products and services are predicted to grow more than twice as fast as the data protection software market as a whole. Gartner predicts that as early as this year, up to 20% of enterprises will use cloud backup.
According to Marketintellica forecasts, the global market for software for creating and storing backup copies on its own (on premises) and on a third-party site (off-site) will grow steadily in the short term.
According to IKS Consulting, in Russia the segment "cloud backup as a service" (BaaS) . According to 2019, companies increasingly rely on cloud backup: more than 48% of respondents use it, and about 27% prefer to combine cloud and local backup.
Requirements for backup systems
Meanwhile, the requirements for data backup and recovery software are changing. To more successfully solve data protection problems and optimize costs, companies are ready to purchase simpler, more flexible and inexpensive solutions, Gartner analysts say. The usual methods of data protection do not always meet the new requirements.
Data backup and recovery systems should provide for simple deployment and administration, convenient management of the backup and recovery process, and online data recovery. Modern solutions often implement data replication functions, automate operations, provide integration with clouds, built-in archiving functions, support hardware data snapshots.
According to Gartner forecast, in the next two years, up to 40% of companies will switch to new backup solutions, replacing existing software, and many will use several products or services at the same time that optimally protect certain systems. Why are they not satisfied with the previous backup and data recovery solutions?
All in one
Analysts believe that as a result of this transition, companies get more flexible, scalable, simpler and more productive systems, often consisting of unified data management and storage software. Advanced backup and recovery products include tools for efficient data management, the ability to move data to where it is most efficiently stored (including automatically), manage it, protect it, and restore it.
With the growth in the diversity and volume of data, comprehensive protection and data management is becoming an important requirement: files, databases, data of virtual and cloud environments, applications, as well as access to various types of data in primary, secondary and cloud storages.
Comprehensive data management solutions provide unified data management across the entire IT infrastructure: data backup, recovery, archiving and snapshot management. However, administrators need to be clear about where, how long, and what data is stored and what policies apply to it. Rapid recovery of applications, virtual machines, and workloads from local or cloud storage minimizes downtime, while automation minimizes human errors.
Large organizations with a mix of legacy, traditional, and modern applications often choose backup systems that support a wide range of operating systems, applications, hypervisors, and relational databases, are highly scalable to petabytes and thousands of clients, and integrate with a wide range of systems. storage, public, private and hybrid clouds and tape drives.
As a rule, these are platforms with a traditional three-tier architecture of agents, media servers, and a management server. They can combine backup and restore, archive, disaster recovery (DR) and cloud backup functions, optimize performance using artificial intelligence and machine learning algorithms.
Forrester believes that centralized management of data sources, policies, robust data recovery, and security are the most important features of a backup solution.
Modern solutions can perform snapshot-based backups of virtual machines at any interval with little or no performance impact on production environments. They bridge the gap between Recovery Point Objective (RPO) and Recovery Time Objective (RTO), guarantee data availability at any time and ensure business continuity.
Data Growth
Meanwhile, the world continues to experience exponential growth in the amount of data being created, and this trend will continue in the coming years. From 2018 to 2025, IDC predicts that the amount of data generated per year will grow from 33 ZB to 175 ZB. The average annual growth rate will exceed 27%. This growth is also influenced by the increase in the number of Internet users. Last year, 53% of the world's population used the Internet. The number of Internet users is increasing by 15-20% annually. New and emerging technologies such as 5G, UHD video, analytics, IoT, artificial intelligence, AR/VR are generating more and more data. Entertainment content and video from CCTV cameras are also sources of data growth. For example, the surveillance video storage market is projected by MarketsandMarkets to grow at 22,4% annually to reach $18,28 billion this year.
Exponential growth in the amount of data being created.
Over the past two or three years, corporate data volumes have grown by about an order of magnitude. Accordingly, the task of backup has become more complicated. Data storage capacities reach hundreds of terabytes and continue to grow as data accumulates. The loss of even a part of this data can affect not only business processes, but also affect brand reputation or customer loyalty. Therefore, the creation and storage of backups significantly affects the entire business.
It can be difficult to navigate the offers of vendors offering their backup options. There are different options for creating and storing backups, but the most popular are local backup systems and using cloud services. Backing up to the cloud or to the provider's data center provides reliable data protection and minimizes the risks associated with software failures, technical malfunctions of equipment and human errors.
Cloud migration
Data can be accumulated and stored in your own data centers, but you will need to provide fault tolerance, clustering and capacity scaling, and have skilled storage administrators on staff. Under these conditions, the transfer of all such issues for outsourcing to the provider is very relevant. For example, when hosting databases in a provider's data center or in the cloud, professionals can be responsible for storing, backing up data, and running databases. The provider will be financially responsible for the service level agreement. Among other things, this allows you to quickly deploy a typical configuration to solve a specific task, as well as provide a high degree of availability due to the reservation of computing resources and backup.
In 2019, the volume amounted to 1834,3 million dollars, and it is expected that by the end of 2026 it will reach 4229,3 million dollars with an average annual growth of 12,5%.
At the same time, more and more data will be stored not in corporate networks and not on end devices, but in the cloud, and, according to IDC, the share of data in public clouds will grow to 2025% by 42. Moreover, organizations are moving towards multi-cloud infrastructures and hybrid clouds. This approach is already followed by 90% of European companies.
Cloud backup is a data backup strategy that involves sending a copy of data over the network to a server offsite. This is typically a service provider's server that charges the customer based on allocated capacity, bandwidth, or number of users.
The widespread adoption of cloud computing and the need to manage large volumes of data are driving the growing popularity of cloud backup solutions. Other benefits associated with the adoption of cloud backup solutions include ease of management and monitoring, real-time backup and recovery, easy integration of cloud backup with other enterprise applications, data deduplication, and multi-client support.
Analysts consider the key players in this market to be Acronis, Asigra, Barracuda Networks, Carbonite, Code42 Software, Datto, Druva Software, Efolder, IBM, Iron Mountain and Microsoft.
Multicloud environments
Storage vendors go to great lengths to ensure that their products work effectively in a multi-cloud environment. The goal is to make data easier to use and move it to where it's needed, and store it in the most efficient way. For example, they use next-generation distributed file systems that support a single namespace, provide access to data across clouds, and offer common management strategies and policies across clouds and locally. The ultimate goal is to manage, protect and use data efficiently, wherever it is.
Monitoring is another of the challenges of multi-cloud storage. You need monitoring tools to track results in a multi-cloud environment. An independent monitoring tool designed for multiple clouds will give you the big picture.
Growth forecast for the global multi-cloud management systems market.
Combining edge and multi-cloud storage is also a challenge. For these systems to work together effectively, you need to know the volumes and types of data, where and how this data will be collected, transmitted and stored. To plan the process, you will also need to know how long each type of data should be stored, where, when and how much data will need to be transferred between different systems and cloud platforms, how it is backed up and protected.
All of this will help administrators minimize the complexity associated with merging edge and multi-cloud storage.
Data at the edge
Another trend is edge computing. According to Gartner analysts, in the coming years, about half of all corporate data will be processed outside the traditional data center or cloud environment: an increasing share of it is located at the edge for storage and local analytics. According to IDC, in the EMEA region, the share of "edge" data will almost double - from 11% to 21% of the total. The reasons are the spread of the Internet of things, the transfer of analytics and data processing closer to their source.
Edge infrastructure - data centers of various sizes and form factors - offer ample processing and storage capabilities and provide low latency. In this regard, changes are planned in the proportion of data volumes placed in the core of the network / data center, on its periphery and on end devices.
The transition from cloud and centralized computing to edge computing has already begun. Such systems are becoming more and more popular. The cost and complexity of creating a centralized architecture for processing a large amount of data is prohibitive, such a system can become poorly managed compared to distributing data processing at the edge or at the corresponding network layer. In addition, data can be aggregated or depersonalized at the edge before being sent to the cloud.
Data abroad
Some companies choose to store data overseas, considering this option to secure data from unauthorized access and an important risk mitigation factor. Data abroad is a guarantee of protecting valuable information. Equipment located abroad is not under Russian jurisdiction. And thanks to encryption, data center employees may not have access to your data at all. Highly reliable equipment is used in modern foreign data centers, high reliability indicators are provided at the level of the data center as a whole.
The use of foreign data centers can have a number of other advantages. The client is insured against the risks associated with force majeure or unfair competition. The use of such sites for storing and processing data will minimize such risks. For example, in the event of seizure of servers in Russia, the company will be able to keep a copy of its systems and data in foreign data centers.
As a rule, the IT infrastructure of foreign data centers is quality standards, a high level of security and data storage control. They use the latest IT solutions, firewalls, communication channel encryption technologies, and DDoS protection tools. Power supply of the data center is also implemented with a high level of reliability (up to TIER III and IV).
Backup to relevant for any business in the Russian Federation that does not work with personal data of users, the storage and processing of which, according to Law No. 152-FZ "On Personal Data", must be carried out on the territory of Russia. These requirements can be met by deploying two sites: the main one in Russia, where primary data processing takes place, and a foreign one, where backup copies are located.
Foreign sites are often used as a backup data center. Thus, maximum safety and reliability is achieved, risks are minimized. In some cases, they are convenient for hosting data and connecting European clients to it. This achieves the best response time for European users. Such data centers have direct access to European traffic exchange points. For example, we 4 points of data placement in Europe at once for its customers - these are Zurich (Switzerland), Frankfurt (Germany), London (Great Britain) and Amsterdam (Netherlands).
What should be considered when choosing a data center?
Using the services of commercial data centers, in addition to a convenient cost structure, a business receives a more flexible service that can be scaled in real time, and only consumed resources are paid (pay-per-use). External data center services also allow you to reduce the risks associated with the uncertainty of the future, easily adapt IT to new technological trends, and focus on your key business processes, rather than maintaining the IT infrastructure.
During the construction and operation of their sites, providers take into account the best practices and international standards that place high demands on the engineering and IT systems of the data center, such as ISO 27001: 2013 Information Security Management (information security management), ISO 50001: 2011 Energy Management System (effective planning data center power supply systems), ISO 22301:2012 Business Continuity Management System (ensuring the continuity of data center business processes), as well as European standards EN 50600-x, the PCI DSS standard regarding the security of processing and storing data from plastic cards of international payment systems.
As a result, the customer receives a fault-tolerant service that provides reliable reliable data storage and business continuity.
Source: habr.com