24 May Five Reasons Why Fast Backup is Critical for Educational Institutions

Being a university or college means not just teaching and supporting young people but also keeping up with modern affairs such as useful applications students use, newest educational trends and of course the latest in IT technology because this is the source for efficient workflows of students and teachers/tutors alike. IT environments become more and more important for educational institutions as they need to manage digital data about their students, learning programmes, administrative content and school websites. Managing the data is one thing, making sure that it will be always available or recoverable in the event of a problem quite another. Without this data, any organisation cannot uphold their daily business routine and this includes universities and schools alike. Many schools use apps and their website to update parents and students, to gain important information from them and use them to interact. Losing this data would mean losing precious hours, days or weeks if there is no plan B: a backup. And you want a fast backup. And for that, you need the right solution and provider.

Fast backup and the agility of recovery are critical for any business, institution or organisation. In fact, they are among the most sought-after features of data protection, according to a recent ESG report. A number of recent case studies conducted with Acronis customers confirmed that speed is a decisive factor when selecting a new backup vendor.
At Acronis, we are prepared for that. Our innovative backup solution for business, Acronis Backup 12.5, is faster, more cost-effective, and easier to use than our competitors. Fast backup and 15-second recoveries make it the perfect solution for modern business environments (download data sheet).

Here are five reasons why backup speed is important, followed by five questions you should ask when choosing a new provider.

1. More data, less time to protect it.

The amount of data in the world continues to grow at an astonishing pace. It’s estimated that every year we create twice as much data than the year before, heading toward 180 zettabytes, or 180 trillion gigabytes of new data in 2025.
While most of this data is going to be machine-generated (thanks to the IoT craziness flooding every facet of our society), human-produced data will still grow at a steady pace. For example, Scuderia Toro Rosso’s Head of IT Raffaele Boschetti recently told Acronis that the amount of data generated daily at the Toro Rosso factory has increased by about 50 percent, compared to the volume 12 months ago. It’s similar to most other modern institutions.
Despite this explosion of data, organisations have less time to protect it and often enough not the staff to do it. In addition to the fact that more data takes longer to back up, system administrators are now busy with many other jobs dealing with their heterogeneous IT environments. They have a limited amount of time to complete all tasks, which makes the speed of backup a major factor in busy environments.
Educational institutions are no exception as they have transformed many processes to the digital world and rely on the data that comes with them.

2. Reduced RPO.

If you generate large amounts of data every day, then even incremental or differential backups can take a long time. The longer the period between backups, the greater the recovery point objective (RPO) window, or the amount of data that is lost between backups.
If the high overhead costs eliminate continuous backup as an option for your organisation, a faster backup is likely the best solution for your business. It lets you run more backup jobs in a given time period, bringing RPOs down to an acceptable level. More frequent backups will decrease the likelihood of data loss in case of a disaster.

3. Airtight RTO.

The ultimate purpose of any backup is the ability to recover data fast and with minimum effort. Recovery Time Objective (RTO) is the target time in which you have to recover data to ensure business continuity. The RTO is normally determined by calculating how much downtime a business can sustain before beginning to suffer negative consequences from data loss. If downtime is not an option, you need a fast backup with fast, multiple data recovery options, like Acronis Backup 12.5 Advanced. It is designed to provide users with multiple data recovery options, regardless of the kind of data or how it was originally backed up. This includes granular recovery, bare-metal recovery, Acronis Universal Restore, Acronis Instant Restore, Acronis vmFlashback, virtual host recovery, and any-to-any migration. Data protected with Acronis Backup 12.5 can be restored in less than 15 seconds, on-premises or in the cloud, and even on different hardware.

4. Reduced utilisation of system resources.

Backup software, or its agent, is normally installed on the device that it protects. Modern software may be very light on system resources, but data compression and encryption can still increase CPU and memory usage – potentially hurting performance. Similarly, if the backup data is being transferred to a remote location over the network, it can be a drag on the capacity needed for normal operations. This is why backups traditionally are scheduled during off-peak hours when the system is free from other tasks.
If your backup software adversely affects processing power, it’s time to move on. Consider Acronis Backup 12.5 Advanced. It’s very light on system resources and can run in the background the whole day, without affecting your daily operations. In addition, it comes with off-host backup processing options, allowing users to move resource-intensive tasks – such as data replication, clean-up and validation – to a different host, freeing up resources even further.

5. Advanced technology.

Fast backup is the result of innovative, advanced technology. Just like you expect a new smartphone to be fast and take care of more than just phone calls, innovative backup software from vendors like Acronis also offer more than just backup.
Acronis backup solutions, are based on a flexible hybrid cloud architecture, which gives you complete control over managing your data. It can also indirectly improve the speed of data protection as a whole since you can choose where to store and how to restore the protected data.
Plus, it comes with Acronis Active Protection, a cutting-edge anti-ransomware technology that detects and stops ransomware attacks and instantly restores any affected data, and blockchain-based data certification through Acronis Notary to ensure easy verification. Taken all together, Acronis Backup 12.5 Advanced simplifies data protection, making it fast, easy, and reliable.
Now that we discussed the importance of having a fast backup, here are five questions you should ask your data protection vendor:

1. Can their data protection solution evolve alongside your business, protecting growing amounts of data without putting undue pressure on your resources?
2. Will you be able to protect all your data, including all workloads in all environments, with a single backup solution?
3. Is your growing data going to affect the recovery time and will you be able to restore your data on any hardware or even a different environment?
4. Will their solution give you the flexibility to choose where to store the protected data, on-premises or in the cloud?
5. Are there proactive defences against ransomware built into their solution to help you protect your data from cyber attacks?

So, do your homework and learn your lesson about data and what a fast and reliable backup can do for you.

To find out more, please contact our Acronis for Academia specialist Charles on Charles.Awode@oldsite.academia.co.uk or call on 01992 703 900