Backup and Recovery
A-to-Zerto Glossary of Terms
Overview
Backup refers to the copy (or multiple copies) of your organization’s data. When you back up data, you are protecting it from accidents or corruption. Accidents include unwanted events such as deletion; corruption might occur through malware, user error, or software upgrading. Recovery is the process you use to restore backup data.
Related Topics
What Is Backup and Recovery ?
Backup is an essential part of data management. Think of it like insurance for your data: when you create a backup copy, you are insuring it against loss, corruption, and malware attacks. At its best, the backup copy is a perfect duplicate of your data and is readily accessible when you need it.
Recovery is the process of accessing the backup and restoring any files that have been corrupted or lost. For the recovery to be effective, the backup copy needs to be easily accessible and up to date. At its best, recovery is seamless and quick.
Differences Between Backup and Replication
Why Is Backup Important?
Without backup, your digital data exists in only one place, such as on a single hard drive or in one instance in the cloud, leaving your data highly vulnerable. One accidental keystroke, one malware attack, or one instance of equipment failure could wipe it all out, much like dropping a sketchbook in a puddle or shredding the wrong stack of papers. Your data is also at risk of corruption, especially during software upgrades or data migrations.
Types of Backup: Select Wisely to Avoid Costly Data Loss
Why Is Recovery Even More Important?
Having multiple copies of your data is important —as in the 3-2-1 rule—, but the ability to recover as quickly as possible from a disruption is more significant from a business standpoint. A quick recovery is essential whether you are dealing with an entire application, a set of applications, a whole site, or single files.
The type of recovery needed drives the performance requirements over the recovery point objective (RPO) and recovery time objective (RTO) metrics. While RPO is influenced by the acceptable data loss for an organization, RTO depends on how much of the recovery process has been automated (instead of manual) and how effectively the recovery plan has been implemented and tested, especially when recovering data and applications consistently to a specific point in time.
Beyond Legacy Backup and DR: It's All about the Recovery
Why Do You Also Need a Backup and Recovery Solution for Your SaaS Applications?
The SaaS model has many advantages, ranging from low upfront (and often total) cost, easy onboarding, quick time-to-value and being able to outsource daily operations and lifecycle management so your IT team can work on more valuable projects.
Downsides include loss of flexibility due to economies of scale, but any good SaaS-vendor will work hard to offer just the right amount of flexibility.
However, there is one downside that’s harder to cope with: the fragmentation of data across the landscape of SaaS. Each SaaS vendor runs their application in an isolated island, a veritable black box. Your data is stored inside their cloud tenant (or datacenter), not yours. But this is your data, and you are responsible for protecting it.
SaaS vendors do not own your data or have any responsibility for protecting it; you are merely storing your data with them to be able to use their SaaS application. No matter which SaaS application you are using, more often than not, each vendor recommends in their respective terms and conditions that customers use a third-party backup solution to retain the operational data and access they require in the event of an unforeseen disaster or disruption.
In a nutshell, assuming that your data is secure just because it’s part of a SaaS application is a risk not worth taking. Despite their many advantages, SaaS vendors are not immune to data loss.
5 Reasons Why Every Business Needs SaaS Backup
Protecting the Patchwork of SaaS
Data Protection with Zerto
Implementing both backup and disaster recovery together ensures breadth and depth for protecting your workloads.
Zerto Backup for SaaS, powered by Keepit, provides backup and recovery for all your key SaaS workloads in a single vendor-neutral platform. Covering Microsoft 365, Azure Active Directory, Dynamics 365, Salesforce, Google Workspace, and more, Zerto provides lifetime retention of all your data, robust security via built-in blockchain, business continuity with 24/7 find and restore, unlimited data storage and retention, and Instant recovery to retrieve SaaS data in seconds.
Zerto for disaster recovery provides the lowest RPOs and fastest RTOs at scale for enterprise environments, leveraging its unique continuous data protection (CDP) engine. Use Zerto for disaster recovery for all top-tier or mission-critical applications to achieve performance-optimized protection with RPOs of seconds and RTOs of minutes, and for all workloads.
Supplement the CDP from Zerto with Zerto Backup for SaaS protecting your SaaS workloads, to create a data protection solution that meets your strategic needs.
Zerto Backup for SaaS
Zerto for Disaster Recovery
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