Why Data Backups Are Even More Important in the Big Data Era

Most businesses make it a priority to adopt the latest technologies and systems. With data becoming so important in recent years, many organizations have looked to big data solutions to help them utilize this flood of useful information. With data becoming a vital element of successful businesses, companies have needed to turn to data backup to ensure business continuity in the face of possible disaster.

As important as data backup is, the various options available to enterprises have made choosing one difficult. Choose a good data backup solution, and your business will be able to continue as normal without so much as a hiccup. Choose an unreliable data backup, and it will feel like you didn’t have one in the first place. Adding to the complexity are the many different types of data backup options to look at.

Of course, being prepared for any situation is part of a business leader’s responsibilities. Losing data of any type for any reason could be disastrous, so data backup plays a vital role in making sure that data is saved and protected. Even so, many business leaders fail to account for all the ways in which data may be lost, stolen, or corrupted. Some cases are the most obvious, like when data or files are deleted by accident. Who hasn’t at some point in their lives unintentionally trashed a document or overwritten a spreadsheet? If that data has been backed up previously, the backup option may feel like a lifesaver, even when the information isn’t crucial to a company’s continued operations.

A lot of businesses may feel confident storing vital documents and data on a storage device, perhaps using traditional hard disk drives or the faster-performing flash storage options. While those can be good backup solutions, there are times when they will fail as well. Relying on a single option, therefore, isn’t always the smartest strategy. With data constantly being moved, transmitted, written, rewritten, deleted, and more, storage failures do take place. Even in cases where it happens rarely, all it takes is for it to happen once to eliminate all of a company’s most important data.

Those are examples of when accidents or technological failures occur, but the situation gets more serious when businesses become victims of cyber attacks. Malware is a constant problem organizations have to guard against, and even the slightest slip up can corrupt and destroy data. Some malware and other types of attacks can go as far as corrupting whole systems. Should such an attack happen, businesses who have full-system and data backups will be able to get back on their feet quickly.

The same holds true when data is destroyed not from an outside attacker but a natural disaster. Should an earthquake or tornado hit a server room, for example, companies could end up losing all the data stored in there. But if a data backup has been performed, preferably in a different location, then even a natural disaster won’t cause a lot of downtime for a company.

When it comes to choosing the right data backup, as mentioned above, there are numerous options to choose from, not just in the different software vendors but in the different types of backups businesses can make. Full backups are the most well known since they do a full backup of data each time. Incremental data backups are also fairly common as they only backup any data that has changed since the last backup was made. Incremental backups take less time than a full backup, though it does require more time to restore the data. Other backup methods include differential, incremental forever, and synthetic full, each with their own benefits to consider when selecting a data backup strategy.

Data remains the lifeblood of many businesses. When using data analytics tools like Hadoop vs. Spark, companies are able to discover incredible insights on how to improves their businesses and reach new customers. For many business leaders, losing that data is a terrifying idea, making data backups a necessary part of any operation. While it may be impossible to be prepared for every potential scenario, data backups give organizations the best chance of keeping up and running in the most unpredictable of cases.