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A big issue for most business organizations is the justification of costs related to data protection and recovery solutions. This is because data protection is typically considered not a revenue generating function but a necessary evil in form of overhead costs that businesses want to keep at minimum. However, in the wake of some publicized recent events and information dispersal - about IT disasters, lost backup tapes and stealing of corporate laptops - has increased awareness and increased the importance of data protection.
While there is no particular definition for data protection and the aspects it includes, most organizations try to involve the following their strategy based on:
Data security: Ensuring that there is no unauthorized access to data – this can involve the use of encryption and application based security technologies.
Data availability: Ensuring that data is always available for business applications – this can include deployment of high-availability storage solutions that utilize technologies such as multiple/redundant storage controllers, remote mirroring, multiple I/O paths, Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks (RAID) and clustered storage systems. Such solutions aim to eliminate single points of failure in the data path and /or storage target.
Data recovery: A business needs to have secure solutions to ensure that any data lost due to mechanical damage or malicious attack is fully restored for the continuity of operations.
The Objectives of Data Recovery
Before a business starts developing its backup and recovery plans, it should clearly define its data recovery objectives for entire data. This can be in terms of:
Recovery Point Objective – It is driven by two major factors:
The number of transactions that can be lost: This may be in terms of actual business application transactions or time units (in manhours). It defines acceptable data loss.
The point of time from which data must be recovered: This is a parameter that generally guides the retention settings used for the protected data.
Recovery Time Objective – It defines how soon should the business function be restored. A business should understand that recovery time objective entails the timeline for resumption of business function and not essentially the amount of time at hand to perform data recovery.
An enterprise must consider these recovery objectives taking into account the different data recovery events, which can vary widely. Business data needs to be recovered when there is an operator error (such as a file deleted accidentally), hardware failure (because of a faulty disk drive), data corruption or a catastrophic occurrence (disaster at the site).
We can classify data recovery events into two categories:
Operational recovery events: These take place in the course of normal business operations. Most of these events are taken care of by backup administrators, system administrators, and database administrators within the organization. However, some small and medium enterprises may not have resources to effectively deal with complex operational IT problems.
Disaster recovery events: A disaster event is one that involves the loss of a entire data center or a significant portion of the data in a data center. Recovery of such data should be done by professionals who use up-to-date software and advanced techniques for the process.
Partnering with a firm specializing in data recovery from different kinds of machines, you can ensure better security of your business data and unforeseen events resulting in data loss will not disrupt your operations.
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