Continuous Data Protection: A Complete Guide

When data is so crucial to a thriving business, how you protect that information is equally important and changes fast. One way to approach this is with continuous data protection (CDP), a proactive approach to safeguarding your rapidly-changing business data. This strategy captures every change made to selected, critical data, ensuring that no information is lost during an unexpected failure or data breach.

Read on to learn more about continuous data protection and how it works.

Continuous data protection (CDP) is a type of data protection that constantly tracks and records every change made to your data as it happens. CDP differs from interval-based backups, which save data snapshots at scheduled intervals (often daily or weekly), because CDP captures everything nearly instantly. A traditional approach, such as daily backups, can leave gaps where changes made after a backup are lost. CDP reduces the risk of data loss from failures, ransomware attacks, or accidental deletions because all the data changes are constantly recorded and stored.

Over the years, data protection technologies have evolved from manual backups to automated, cloud-based solutions. As businesses demand more protection for growing amounts of data, CDP emerges as a cutting-edge solution that builds upon the limitations of traditional enterprise backup strategies. By continuously capturing data, CDP represents the next step in ultimate data protection and reliability.

A continuous data protection strategy will typically include:

• Real-time data capture: CDP continuously monitors and records every data change, ensuring that no information is lost or overlooked.
• Granular recovery options: With CDP, businesses can restore data to any specific point in time by creating a point-in-time backup, down to the minute, from which they want to restore.
• Visualization of data changes: Customers can execute a data changes report that visualizes all changes to a selected object within a specific period (even as short as a minute), helping to pinpoint the exact moment to create a backup for precise restoration.

Continuous data protection provides an additional layer of security beyond regular backups, safeguarding rapidly changing data against a wide range of potential risks, including system failures, cyberattacks, and human error. For businesses that rely on this type of data, losing any of it or experiencing downtime can disrupt critical processes. CDP can help you avoid losing hours or days of work and ensure your company has constant access to all your data.

Certain industries, such as finance, healthcare, and e-commerce, have particularly high demands for data protection and compliance. These sectors handle sensitive and high-volume, rapidly changing data, where even a brief loss can result in serious consequences for the organization and its customers. For example, financial institutions must safeguard transaction records, healthcare providers need to protect patient data, and e-commerce businesses rely on continuous operations to prevent sales loss.

The main advantage of CDP is having constant access to rapidly changing data, even after a major disruption, and avoiding the loss of this critical information.

CDP can reduce downtime and speed up disaster recovery. Since it continuously logs every data change, CDP lets businesses recover the most current version of their rapidly-changing data without losing crucial information. If there's a problem, CDP can get your business back on its feet quickly.

Some of the other benefits of continuous data protection are best understood through the differences between CDP and other methods:

Traditional backups are periodic, taking snapshots of your data at scheduled intervals (e.g., daily, weekly). This approach means that data can only be restored to the most recent backup point—whether that's from the last day, the last hour, or even longer. For businesses dealing with minute-by-minute changes, this is simply not enough to comply with disaster recovery plans and Recovery Point Objectives established by the business to support and ensure continued business operations.

Another limitation of interval-based approaches to backup is that they are limited in the scale of data that can be protected and realistically backed up within any given period of time. This forces organizations to leave valuable data unprotected and can put business continuity at risk. CDP, on the other hand, continuously captures every data change of the selected data, so nothing is lost. While traditional backups may seem simpler and cheaper, CDP offers significant advantages in terms of recovery speed, data integrity, and reduced operational impact.

Both near CDP and true CDP offer advanced data protection, but there are distinct differences between the two. Near CDP captures data at frequent intervals, like every few minutes, while true CDP captures data changes without any gaps. While near CDP may suffice for businesses that can tolerate minimal data loss, true CDP is crucial for organizations that require zero data loss and maximum business continuity, such as financial services or e-commerce, where even a few seconds of loss could result in significant revenue loss. True CDP offers the peace of mind that every piece of data is captured and recoverable.

Begin by assessing your data protection needs and identifying the objects that require continuous coverage. Think about what assets are essential to business continuity, security, and compliance. By mapping out which data is most important to protect, you can implement CDP effectively.

Consider choosing one that will give your company the features you need. One solution is Salesforce Backup & Recover, which offers a Continuous Data Protection capability as a separate add-on. With CDP, you can generate on-demand backups at specific points in time, immediately before and after incidents, to prevent the potential loss of unrecoverable data.

Learn more about Backup & Recover to get started.