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Key Takeaways The standard nightly backup model leaves companies vulnerable to data loss. Anything created or modified between the last backup and a failure event is at risk.
AI makes continuous data protection (CDP) practical and affordable. It can keep a discerning eye on the data it’s watching and prioritize the critical data.
AI-powered backup systems continuously watch over production systems, get a good idea of what is normal, quickly notice an anomaly and raise an alert immediately.
When it came to enterprise IT across organizations, there was hardly any other practice set in stone than the nightly backups. For decades, the standard data backup paradigm relied on backups taken every night when a snapshot of all data in the systems was taken and stored onto a disk or tape and kept aside.
While considered effective for its balanced approach to conserving resources and ensuring data security, it always left organizations vulnerable to data loss. For example, a debilitating server crash on Monday evening could compromise thousands of critical records that were stored during your busiest day of the week.
Now with AI at our disposal, the need to bear the risk of a non-recoverable window has been greatly reduced. AI-powered data protection solutions can make data backups a near continuous process through a mix of intelligent prediction and tiering.
Why nightly backups were always an Achilles’ heel for organizations
To be fair, most organizations did not necessarily choose nightly backups because they were foolproof. They likely chose them because they offered a cost-effective solution for backing up data when there was the least volume of workload on their systems. Snapshots were taken at leisure and duly backed up by IT teams initially on tape and later on disks as technology moved ahead. Anything between the last backup and a data loss event was taken as a qualified risk.
However, this strategy started unravelling in the last two decades, with organizations working across time zones becoming the norm. Critical data from overseas operations routinely became the first victims of any data loss event. Add to that, in recent years, ransomware attacks started to exploit the vulnerability and tried to compromise the largest amount of data since the last backup to force companies to pay up.
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