When people have valuable possessions, they do everything they can to protect them. It’s devastating when those valuables are damaged or lost. In today’s digital economy, few things are more valuable than data. Organizations of all types and sizes pump out massive amounts of data every day, and that data is integral to who they are and what they do. With that in mind, it makes sense that companies would want to take the proper steps to protect it.
Damaged files can be detrimental to a company’s overall success. They can slow down productivity and operations and even result in financial loss. Beyond that, corrupted data can damage a company’s reputation by putting sensitive customer information at risk.
Unfortunately, it’s not uncommon for data to be compromised or damaged, whether from cyber attacks, accidental deletions, or irreparable damage to hardware or software. These threats are often out of a company’s control. While a company may be unable to stop its data from being lost or damaged, it can mitigate the problem by implementing systems to restore and recover that data.
The importance of data backup and restoration
Companies need reliable backup and restore solutions if they want to ensure they can retrieve their data. Data backups preserve a usable copy that can replace any lost or damaged data. They also make sure that the backup data is consistent with the original, undamaged data.
In addition to the obvious benefit of data loss prevention, backups provide practical, emotional, and financial advantages. They can give company leaders peace of mind by helping the organization stay compliant with data retention and protection regulations and allowing the company to avoid paying costly fees associated with data breaches.
There’s just one catch to data restoration: it can only happen with some form of backup. Just as the name implies, a data backup makes proactive copies of files and system data so that they can be restored if needed. With traditional data restoration solutions, damaged or lost data is identified and copied from the backup to either the original location or to a new one, where it is then used instead of the lost or damaged data.
The problem with traditional data backup and recovery solutions
Many experts recommend that companies make up to three copies of all their data and store them in different locations. While this strategy sounds like a good idea and certainly ensures that companies maintain a plethora of data, it comes with several challenges.
For starters, traditional backup solutions only permit periodic backups, which can leave a gap in data protection. Any changes made between backups are subject to being lost. For this reason, periodic backup schedules are less than ideal.
Traditional backup solutions can also be time-consuming. They often take a long time to complete, especially for companies that handle large volumes of data. The biggest problem with longer backup times is that they can result in employee downtime and productivity slowdowns.
From a financial standpoint, making three copies of data can be extremely costly, requiring expensive hardware and software. Additionally, this amount of data takes up a lot of storage space, which can also increase the overall operational cost.
While making abundant copies of data seems like a smart idea for data restoration, it can actually produce a more complex data recovery process. Traditional backup solutions use a rigid backup schedule that can make it difficult to recover data from a specific time. Limited backup options also make restoring particular data sets or individual files challenging. There’s also a lack of automation when it comes to traditional backup solutions. These solutions often rely on manual processes for backup and recovery, which introduce more opportunities for human error.
Traditional backup solutions may sound easy and practical, but they come with more risks and complexities than meet the eye.
Panzuras refreshingly fast solution
Here at Panzura, we believe a company’s data is worth protecting. We’re also convinced there are better ways to do that than using traditional methods.
Any time data moves, a new complexity or risk is introduced. Backups across multiple locations create a lot of movement. Using our groundbreaking technology, Panzura reduces the need for data replication and storage across multiple layers and eliminates the need for ongoing data backups.
CloudFS enables companies to implement more efficient backup and restoration processes by giving them a global file system that deduplicates, compresses, and encrypts data into a single authoritative source. All data is stored in an object store in immutable form, meaning all changes are additive and nothing can be overwritten. This immutable storage method enables users to overcome the challenges they faced with traditional backup solutions.
If files or directories are corrupted, deleted, or encrypted, the Self-Service Mass File Restoration feature allows companies to recover files and boost data resilience. Rather than restoring files from a traditional backup, Panzura Data Services restores data using snapshots. Data is already stored in the cloud and tracked by CloudFS using metadata, so data doesn’t need to be copied — only the metadata.
Panzura features a repository that allows it to rebuild any version of a file at every location, thus improving business continuity, disaster recovery, and ransomware resilience. Immutable data is stored in write-once-read-many form and read-only snapshots. Since data cannot be overwritten, all changes are saved as pointers pointing toward the original data.
When files are damaged, companies don’t have to worry about them being lost forever. Since data is never deleted, they simply need to locate and restore previous versions of files. If data is attacked by ransomware, the attacker alters only the pointer map rather than the data. With Panzura, companies only need to recover the pointer map, which allows data recovery to happen 200 times faster than traditional solutions.
File auditing enables companies to track any changes to their data, helping them detect ransomware and other attacks that can damage their data. Audit search allows them to specify what activities they want to track. They can even track the actions of a single user. Companies can search a file, determine what happened to it, and restore it to its original or new location. With CloudFS snapshots, users can be restored to the NFS directory in minutes.
The rise of technology has made data a vital resource for companies across all industries. Unfortunately, technology is not without its flaws and risks, and data can be easily damaged or lost. Panzura helps companies put systems in place to ensure that no matter what happens, their data can always be restored to its original state. And we make it faster than most people ever thought possible.