Only Cohesity brings AI-powered data security and management together in one platform that is simple, secure, and scalable.
A unified platform for securing, managing, and extracting value from your data, available as self-managed software and SaaS.
Explore how we outperform the competition, starting with the five S’s: Speed, Scale, Simplicity, Security, Smarts.
Discover what customer-centric means at Cohesity—and why enterprises worldwide choose us to secure and manage their data.
See why Cohesity is the leader in AI-powered data security.
Watch the video
Database backup
One platform. One UI. Available as self-managed software and SaaS.
Simplify data protection, ensure recovery, and defend against ransomware with a modern, hyperscale solution.
Make smarter business decisions faster with Cohesity’s AI conversational assistant using your most important enterprise data.
Protect against ransomware with threat intelligence and scanning, cyber vaulting, and ML-powered data classification.
Isolate your data to further strengthen your ransomware protection and recovery strategy with our SaaS solution.
Enterprise data protection and security solution.
Manage, secure, and do more with unstructured data. Get software-defined file and object services for the hybrid cloud.
Turnkey, cyber-hardened data protection.
Predictive analytics for unified insights.
Protect your critical SaaS, cloud-native, and on-premises data sources with an enterprise-class cloud backup service.
Defend against cyber threats and speed access to insights with apps from Cohesity and industry partners.
Industries
Environments
Use Cases
Looking for blogs, demos, eBooks, and more? Explore our latest resources in one convenient spot.
We know you’re busy. So when something doesn’t work quite right, our experts are here to help you fix it—fast.
With Cohesity, you can rest assured that your data is protected and secure.
Discover how AI, data security, and cloud will shape cyber resilience in 2025.
Cohesity is 100% committed to building relationships that offer value both to our partners and joint customers.
Innovate and engage with Cohesity to drive your business.
Cohesity brings together the deepest, broadest partner ecosystem for data and apps.
Choose from a variety of Cohesity-certified GSI partners to help you transform your data security and management experience.
Unleash the power of data and drive profitable growth and recurring revenue for your cloud and managed services.
Deliver confidence to customers through Cohesity-focused, partner-branded professional services.
A collective of data security and services companies to help enterprises win the war against cyberattacks.
Cohesity is driving the future of AI-powered data security.
Meet with us in a personalized virtual environment to understand how Cohesity can fit your business needs.
Database backup is the process of creating a copy of structured data, including a company’s master and transaction data files, within database workloads, ensuring data protection and recovery across on-premises and cloud environments.
As consumers, we need extra supplies when our typical resources aren’t usable. For instance, in case of a blackout, one would want candles, flashlights, and canned goods.
Similarly, a database backup is a copy of key data you can access in case of a cyberattack, natural disaster, accidental deletion, or other threat.
Next to people, data is a business’s most valuable asset. You use data to run your business. Your daily operations depend on financial data, customer information, employee records, product details, proprietary formulas and processes, and application software. Prolonged downtime through data interruption hurts both your reputation and bottom line.
Data corruption and data loss can occur through a natural disaster such as fire and floods, power or hardware failure, human error, and cybercriminal attacks. When a data disaster strikes, you need the ability to quickly recover and restore those files and your business to normal operating status.
The planning strategies of database backup and recovery could not be more crucial to business continuity (BC). Coupled with disaster recovery (DR), the acronym BC/DR encompasses two sides of the same coin. Whereas disaster recovery restores needed technology, business continuity is about keeping the business as a whole functioning.
There are three general types of database backup:
Let’s review these database backup types. Say you make a full backup of your client database on Friday. Then on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday, certain client files change. An incremental backup on each of those days would only include the data that has changed since the previous backup. On Wednesday, you might decide to run a differential backup, which would update the data to account for the changes that were made since Friday.
Many businesses have multiple databases. For example, Oracle may provide a solution for accounting, but a different application (and database) may be best for inventory control.
Databases also come in different structural forms or schemas, such as relational, table-like databases (Oracle, Microsoft SQL, MySQL, SAP HANA). There are also distributed databases like NoSQL and Hadoop, and Software as a Service (SaaS) platforms like Microsoft 365, Azure, and Amazon Web Services (AWS).
With so many database choices, having the right database backup software is essential. Database backup solutions have often been provided by multiple vendors using different manual and automated processes residing in aging infrastructure. These legacy systems can cause data fragmentation and drastically slow recovery times.
Because data is so valuable to organizations, a modern database backup service or database backup software is essential.
No one is immune to data threats. In addition to power interruptions, equipment failures, and other non-purposeful events, it’s important to remember the threat of cyberattacks. Cybercriminals are bent on getting or corrupting your data and making you pay to fix it. They’re clever and persistent.
According to an article by Fortune Magazine, “the world saw an alarming 105% surge in ransomware cyberattacks last year.” Such attacks try to shut down a business’s computer systems, holding the data for ransom by offering to “fix” the problem for a fee.
The need for an effective database backup and recovery solution is more important than ever.
Data backups provide a safety net in case of any disruptions to your business data. They protect you against potential risks to reputation and bottom line. Consider these database backup benefits:
The way database backup is accomplished depends on the size of your business, the technology you’re using, and the type of electronic data you use to run your business. Your backup process can be manual or automated. A small, uncomplicated business might simply copy files to an alternate hard drive, the cloud, or external drive.
It’s wise to keep copies of data in an offsite location in case of environmental threats or physical break-ins. If your backup involves some physical device (external drive or tape, for example), you will need to transport the backup offsite and physically retrieve it if restoration is required. This process involves manual steps and is more time-consuming and far less reliable and secure than cloud-based backup and recovery.
For more convenience and security, most businesses will want a modern software-based backup solution. For example, BaaS, an online or cloud-based backup solution, is a way of storing data remotely in the cloud and having the service provider manage the backup and recovery infrastructure, software, and support services. Using BaaS can free up equipment and staff, thus boosting the bottom line.
A database backup restore can also be done manually or automatically:
Some data recovery operations may only involve specifically identified files, tables, or objects. That likely involves quickly getting back one or just a few specific datasets from among many volumes.
On the other hand, any major disruptive event such as a cyberattack, natural or man-made disaster, or even human error may require a full database restore. The goal is to remain operational amidst the disaster and return systems to normal as soon as possible. A robust disaster recovery strategy is critical to helping organizations:
Database backup requires time and labor costs associated with establishing procedures, defining schedules, and monitoring the related processes. This is because databases are typically used to hold critical business data, like customer records or product inventory, and require clear processes.
Cloud backup comes with many pros, but also cons, such as:
If hackers and cybercriminals can access your live operational files, they may also try to corrupt your database backups.
It’s much safer to back up in the cloud or some other remote location than on-premises. The drawbacks of a local backup are:
How often you back up your database depends on the nature of your business and database backup strategy. The best rule is “as often as you’re changing your files.”
If your business requires that you minimize work-loss exposure, consider taking incremental backups every 15 to 30 minutes, for example. Many businesses schedule full backups weekly, with incremental or differential backups daily.
It’s a good business practice to periodically review your procedures. Analysis of growth, data volumes, and experience with threats or actual disruptions may prompt changes to your database backup procedures or frequency.
This depends on your business and the type of data you gather and use. Do you have any required regulatory reporting requirements? In this case, the database backup and recovery best practice would be to retain older backups for regulatory compliance. These can come in handy in special business situations as well, such as reconstructing transaction history.
You may have other considerations when defining your database backup strategy. What, if anything, have you published about the retention of records in your privacy and information policies? How often are database transactions added or updated?
Bottom line—your business needs will determine both frequency and retention decisions. Reviewing policies and procedures frequently is a smart business practice. It’s much better to be prepared by anticipating problems or even new business activity, rather than scrambling to recover from a surprise data difficulty.
It’s imperative to try and prevent any data attack or disruption with security strategies and technology. Maintaining a database backup and recovery system is equally important. Having the means to restore databases quickly and easily when an unwelcome data breach occurs is being operationally protected and financially responsible.
Cohesity’s backup and recovery solution simplifies your backup and recovery processes and makes them more efficient. You can look forward to predictable pricing for all workloads and one intuitive user interface for your data.
At Cohesity, you can rely on encryption for data that’s both in flight and at rest, fast recovery times, and easy-to-search data.
