Imagine having to defend your organization in a courtroom. You’re making your case using information you’ve put together from your archives. The crux of your case rests on one document, which your legal team has reviewed and ensures is watertight. But the opposition produces a copy of the same document with information that undermines your case.
How could this happen? Most likely it’s because a copy of the document was squirrelled away somewhere and never versioned properly. It probably was leaked (perhaps intentionally) and now it’s threatening your position in court.
How could this have been avoided? The answer is simple: continuous data protection. That means having all copies and versions of enterprise files backed up and easy to access.
In the past, data protection consisted of weekly backups that were compiled into monthly backups and then annual backups, so at the end of the year only one copy of the data existed. In this scenario, the document version that undermined the court case would have been accounted for if the organization had a continuous data protection plan in place.
As mobility leads to greater enterprise file sharing and organizations open more branch offices around the world, the need for a comprehensive continuous data protection plan is essential.
Consider the sheer, unmitigated volume of data that’s created every day by organizations worldwide. So much data is generated, but much of it is duplicated. Attachments are sent all over the place while files are copied, stored on thumb drives, shared online, edited, revised, etc. The end result is multiple versions and duplicates, which creates data retention and compliance challenges.
If your company has a data retention policy, you also need a data protection policy. For instance, if you’re required to keep data for nine years, you must have the ability to restore the data at any point across a nine-year span.
Consider a company that creates hip replacements. This organization must keep everything about its devices on file, as well as who used the device, when they received it and how the device performed. The organization has to keep this data for more than a decade after the patient’s death.
Situations like these show why continuous data protection is essential for organizations. It’s critical you have a system that ensures every version of every file is stored individually and can be accessed or replicated on demand.
This system should also have sophisticated de-duplication technology to ensure you’re not wasting space by storing multiple copies of the same versions of a document. Finally, it’s important that the system tracks the details of each version, including who created it, when, from where and possibly why/how.
With continuous data protection, you’ll feel confident that your files are backed up, easy to access and secure.
