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DISASTER
RECOVERY
_____________ Corporate President/CEO Vice
President
CONFERENCE REGISTRAR Brazil:
Jose Carlos Ferreira
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Click Here for a Printable Version DATA PROTECTION Protecting
Your Data, Protecting Your Business By CHRIS MIDGLEY There is no doubt
there is a new urgency and focus on business continuity and data protection
– as two of the most critical aspects of disaster recovery for
organizations today. The impact of recent world events, coupled with
an overwhelming dependency on electronic data in virtually every business
sector, has caused a majority of organizations to take a step back and
re-examine their data protection strategies a moving forward. For the
Fortune 500 companies of the world, these aspects of disaster recovery
planning often involve investing millions of dollars in completely redundant
off site systems and/or data centers. However, for the many thousands
of companies that are not among the largest enterprises worldwide, effective
data protection can be a daunting task. Protecting An Organization’s
Most Important Asset
Any one of these factors can cause
data loss, and the results can be catastrophic. It can result in the
loss of irreplaceable information or files that may take hundreds of
hours and thousands of dollars to recreate. For today’s organizations,
the loss of its most important corporate asset can have an incredibly
negative impact in real dollars, lost opportunity, customer dissatisfaction,
shareholder insecurities and overall corporate image. Regardless of
the cause, data disruption and loss poses a significant risk for any
business. Backup: This is the process of copying important data and maintaining duplicate copies for restoration in case of data loss or damage. A variety of file versions are necessary to ensure that it is possible to restore the most recent usable copy of the data required. Protecting data backups off site is a necessary precaution for disaster recovery, and multiple generations of backups provide the ability to recover to a particular point in time. Archive: Archiving involves copying disk file systems and placing the copy (usually on tape) into long-term storage. Archives create a legally acceptable business history and can also be used to free up hard disk space by allowing users to create an off line version of static data or files and delete the online copy. Recovery: Recovery is the process of recovering from an outage or disaster. In off site vaulting of data, backup media is protected in a remote, secure location as part of the tape rotation scheme. This off site media is available for system recovery if the on site media is lost or damaged in a disaster. Today, you don’t need to be one of the largest corporations in the world to have a best-in-class data protection strategy that incorporates all these components. Later in the article, we will discuss the newer options available to organizations today that don’t tax resources or budgets as much as the more traditional data protection solutions of the past. But first, let’s discuss how data protection is one aspect of ensuring a company’s long term viability – through business continuity. Planning For The Worst The objective of business continuity planning and data protection specifically is to minimize the impact to an organization in the case of an outage, interruption or disaster. So the question remains, how do organizations deal with the new urgency around issues of business continuity and data protection? Are there any options available for companies that don’t have the resources of the Fortune 500 and can’t afford to have redundant systems or data centers? These companies may not have as many resources, but they have just as much to lose if their data is lost or their servers go down. For companies with an eye on the bottom line, managed service providers offer an alternative solution. DR For The Rest Of Us Simple and low-risk data removal: Data is no longer at risk of not being removed or mislaid during the removal process. A managed service provider utilizes low-cost Internet connections through a secured network connection to a backup server located in a protected off site data center vault, so data is automatically and immediately sent off site. Tape damage or mishandling as well as transportation issues are completely eliminated. Safe and accessible data archiving: By using a managed service provider, data is never in an unsafe environment and is always accessible. A managed service provider addresses concerns over improper storage by protecting data off site in a secure data center. Reliable data recovery: Problems surrounding recovery including reliability of restores, inaccessibility of current data and the speed of recovery, are eliminated by using a managed service provider. Ease of manageability: Managed service providers allow customers to manage their data protection process through a personalized Web management interface, so they can view the status of their data and initiate recovery from anywhere – through any Web browser. While the service provider assumes responsibility and automates back-end functions, users retain overall control of their data protection by creating customized backup policies, checking status and initiating restore operations whenever needed. Gartner estimates that two out
of five companies that experience a disaster will go out of business
in five years. Given the current world conditions and the volatile economic
environment, companies today cannot afford not to have a data protection
and business continuity strategy as part of their overall disaster recovery
plan. With the new urgency surrounding these issues, managed service
providers offer companies who may not necessarily have the resources
of the Fortune 500, a solution that won’t overburden their internal
resources or tax their budgets, but will give them the protection and
reliability that they need. Chris Midgley is the co-founder and chief technology officer of LiveVault, a leading provider of fully managed online data backup and recovery services. To comment on this article, go to 1503-09 at www.drj.com/feedback.
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