Data Protection Challenges in the Modern Enterprise

The role of information technology in the modern business is going through a tremendous transformation. The key drivers for this transformation are:

• Data growth

  Many organizations continue to experience exponential growth, which creates a greater challenge for efficient data management and protection. What works well for dozens of databases may not work well for hundreds or thousands of databases, often running on different platforms and on multiple physical servers.

• Real-time analytics

  Organizations are increasingly dependent on data analysis for critical real-time decisions. This dependency increases the pressure to maintain data integrity and prevent data loss.

• Continuous global availability

  Many databases provide 24/7 access across multiple time zones, which means that databases are continuously active.

The protection strategies described in “Traditional Database Backup Techniques” are not designed to solve the challenges created by this transformation. Enterprises find themselves without a consistent backup and recovery strategy. The following shortcomings are common to most or all of the traditional backup techniques:

• Data loss exposure

  A database is only recoverable to its last valid backup, which may have occurred hours or days ago. In addition, storage snapshots and third-party appliances cannot validate Oracle data blocks, and so cannot detect Oracle block-level corruptions.

• Long backup windows

  As database sizes increase, the lengths of the backup windows also increase, creating additional load on production systems. Critical databases cannot afford to be deprived of resources used for daily backups and related maintenance activities.

• Lack of backup validation

  Because most third-party backup snapshot and Recovery Appliances lack Oracle integrated data block and database backup validation, restore and recovery operations tend to fail. Such failures result in extended downtime and potentially larger data loss.

• Lack of end-to-end visibility

  As the number of databases increases exponentially, so the ease of manageability decreases. Backup scripts proliferate and change. New DBAs may struggle to understand what the legacy scripts do. Questions about the status, backup location, and recovery point objective (RPO) of a particular database become harder to answer.

The traditional techniques fail to provide a comprehensive and efficient Oracle-integrated data protection solution that meets the demands of a large-scale, enterprise Oracle environment. A new approach is required.