As the amount of data that IT organizations are asked to manage continuously increases, the ability to recover data in a timely manner becomes increasingly problematic. Not only do organizations have major challenges meeting recovery time and point objectives, but most of them are not even 100 percent sure which pristine copy of a specific set of data might be where at any given moment.
Aiming to bring some order to the data protection chaos, ClearSky Data has unfurled a managed service through which it continuously backs up data using a set of appliances running VMware software that are tethered to the Amazon Web Services (AWS) public cloud.
Designed as an extension of an existing managed service of primary data, ClearSky Data CTO Lazarus Vekiarides says it makes use of a metro network ClearSky Data has thus far deployed in Boston, Philadelphia and Las Vegas to provide caching services that enable recovery time objectives (RTO) of less than a minute.
Better still, given the reduced complexity associated with relying on a service versus acquiring multiple tools and the IT staff needed to master them, Vekiarides says the total cost of providing data protection is substantially reduced.
“We’re seeing a 50 percent drop in the cost of operations,” says Vekiarides.
Vekiarides says ClearSky Data plans to make its services available nationwide. But for the moment, the service is only available in three metropolitan regions. Nevertheless, its mere existence portends the arrival of a new approach to data protection. Most IT organizations don’t focus attention on the recovery part of the data protection process until there’s an emergency. By then, they usually discover that their recovery time and point objectives were overly ambitious given the limitations of legacy approaches to data protection.
Given the requirements associated with protecting data across some highly regulated vertical industries, it’s too early to say how many IT organizations will consider opting to employ a managed service to protect their data. But at a time when compliance regulations are becoming stricter about being able to recover data in a timely manner, many of them may soon find they have no other practical alternative.
