What Is Data Protection?
Data protection is the process of safeguarding data against loss, corruption, or security threats. From backups to recovery and data reuse, it covers all techniques an organization may use to keep data secure and highly available for its products, services, and operations.
In this article, we’ll dive into the various technologies and techniques at a system administrator’s disposal for keeping data safe.
The Traditional Approach to Data Protection
The philosophy behind data protection in the server room or data center has long been one of redundancy. You can’t afford to have your data lost, corrupted, or compromised, so always have a backup.
Of course, in practice, backing up your data is the bare minimum. Data protection is really an exercise in managing your recovery point objectives (RPOs) and recovery time objectives (RTOs) for the most critical services in your operational technology stack.
The industry solution to high service-level expectations was the high-availability (HA) cluster. In the traditional active-passive implementation, one server handles the load while a backup server remains on standby until there’s a failure. When a server fails, its workload is passed to the failover server until it can be restored.
Alternatively, an active-active cluster may also be deployed. In this scenario, a load balancer utilizes both servers in the cluster to handle requests, matching the performance of an active-passive cluster during a failure, while doubling the performance during normal operation.
Beyond clustering architectures, data protection also includes disk mirroring, snapshots, and redundant networks. While the tools available to system administrators have evolved, the general approach to data protection has always been one of resilience through redundancy.