Traditional Backup and Recovery Heads for Obsolescence

As Tropical Storm — soon to be hurricane — Isaac takes aim at the Gulf Coast, some IT professionals are starting to make the case that traditional backup and recovery are essentially obsolete.

Case in point is Axcient, a provider of a data protection service that allows an IT organization to recover all the data and applications for entire offices in a matter of minutes. Instead of backing up data and software and then trying to recover it using new infrastructure, Axcient allows an IT organization to keep two compressed copies of any application environment handy. The first is stored on a local server, which in turn then replicates a copy of that environment in the Axcient cloud. If there is a local outage issue, the IT organization points users to the local server. For major outages, IT organizations simply point users to the instance of the application environment running in the Axcient cloud. There is no recovery process because the applications are ready to run.

Axcient isn’t the only vendor pursuing an approach to data protection that takes advantage of virtualization and cloud computing. But it is one of the first to bring this capability down to a price point starting at $89 per month.

Axcient CEO Justin Moore says that at this point the only reason many organizations still rely on traditional backup and recovery software is inertia. Most of them still think that data protection services that make a virtual office instantly available in the cloud are out of their price reach. The end result is nothing short of a flawed data protection strategy that is based on obsolete technology, adds Moore.

The biggest issue, of course, with replacing traditional backup and recovery systems is inertia. After all, IT organizations have been pretty much handling data protection the same way for the better part of four decades. But given the fact that the cost of downtime keeps rising as more organizations continue to increase their dependency on IT, the time has come to find a better way to maintain both IT availability and business continuity.