As we kick off 2019, I wanted to reflect back on a trend that has continued to gain momentum over the past few years–the march towards cloud-native applications that rely on highly-distributed and non-relational NoSQL databases. Our industry increasingly relies on architectures that embrace scale-out, highly-distributed systems. From small startups designing entirely in the cloud to large enterprises developing net new customer facing applications, the move to NoSQL databases has increased across the globe.

While cloud-native architectures and, in particular, NoSQL databases solve problems such as resiliency from hardware failures and geographic distribution, they also amplify a few common pitfalls. One of the biggest challenges is that because NoSQL databases have done such an excellent job with native database replication, many organizations are fooled into a false sense of protection. The irony here is that by solving one major problem, many others now lurk in the background, leaving critical customer data at risk. As organizations continue to deploy production applications on NoSQL databases, it’s nearly inevitable that the data will become unavailable or corrupted.

What happens in the event of a virus attack, data corruption, or a simple human error such as an admin dropping a table? If the only copies are online, then all copies are affected. Until now, the products to backup a distributed database in an application-consistent fashion or properly recover to a past point in time were difficult to use or incomplete. This leads to more database repairs and downtime and doesn’t provide the needed RPO and RTO to support customer and business needs. Most importantly, given the cloud nature of these databases and the fact that they’re heavily used by DBAs and DevOps teams, the simplicity of the backup product at the scale of the data sets is key to adoption.

With Rubrik Datos IO, a new data protection and data management product exists for NoSQL non-relational databases. Rubrik Datos IO addresses these challenges, offering more flexible RPO and reduced RTO to NoSQL databases through application-consistent, point-in-time offline backups, including deduplication across versions to increase storage efficiency.

Interested in learning more? Join us for an upcoming webinar on January 16th, where we’ll discuss this topic in depth and answer your questions. We look forward to having you join us!