Beyond Backup: To data protection, and beyond

A while back, we wrote about the differences between backup and data protection. While the points made there are still valid, the industry’s definitions of these terms have continued to evolve, as has our thinking on the topic.

At N‑able, we’ve settled on a definition shared by analyst firm William Blair in a recent report: data protection solutions should include backup, disaster recovery, and archiving/retention of backups. That’s what we offer with Cove Data Protection, and it’s all delivered as a fully hosted SaaS application with cloud storage included.

Backup on its own is not enough

Clearly, just having backups isn’t enough, and in today’s ransomware-infested world, the architecture behind your data protection solution makes a real and meaningful difference. It’s critical to have backups stored remotely, off the local network and out of the reach of ransomware that may be scanning for backup files and applications.

An efficient, cloud-first architecture is built for this requirement and reduces the size of the attack surface in two ways: by keeping primary backup storage in the cloud and by hosting the application remotely as well. This way, even if secondary local backup copies are deleted or encrypted, you can still log into the Cove dashboard from any browser (using mandatory two-factor authentication) and perform the recovery you need from the cloud.

Cloud-first data protection is the modern way

Cloud-first data protection is conceptually well ahead of legacy on-prem image backup solutions that have tried to modernize by bolting on extra steps, licenses, and configuration requirements to push secondary backup copies to a third-party cloud location. These products add significant cost, complexity, and administrative time to add on what has become a fundamental requirement. Cove takes the opposite approach, sending backup copies to our private cloud by default, making local backup storage optional and secondary.

This architecture wouldn’t be feasible with traditional image backup, as incremental backup files are up to 60 times larger than with Cove. Cove was built to create small, lightweight incremental backups that can be sent to our cloud as often as every 15 minutes.

Minimizing downtime

And now with the recent announcement of the new Standby Image feature, you have even more recovery options. For a small monthly per-device fee, Standby Image will help you create, manage, and report on a bootable copy of your most recent backup at the secondary location of your choice. This way, customers or applications that require the fastest recovery can have a standby image ready to go, speeding up the recovery process and minimizing downtime.

What about the “beyond” part of this headline? While backup and disaster recovery are your last line of defense and critical path to recovery, don’t forget the necessary preventative measures. That’s why N‑able offers a full line of security solutions to help you provide a layered defense.

Learn more about cloud-first data protection here.

Carrie Reber is senior product marketing manager for N‑able.