Implementing a Modern Backup Architecture

Introduction Fail-proof data backup and recovery is more critical to an organization’s survival than ever before as few businesses can survive for any period of time without their IT function. With so much reliance on electronic data, an organization can lose millions of dollars associated with lost data including its competitive advantage and credibility as in the case of security breaches. Implementing a cost-effective fail-proof backup and recovery capability enables an organization to protect itself from data loss and costly downtime that result from hardware or software failure, power failure, natural disaster, intrusion, or human error. With our focus on backup architectures, it’s important to understand the various roles of backup. We can define “backup” as simply a tool or method for executing two primary functions in the data center: