Data Protection And Archiving
Most senior managers know that if they lose their critical business data due to hardware failure, virus, or disaster, that it could lead to lengthy business disruption, loss of reputation, financial damages, and possibly even the failure of the company. Yet, an amazing number of organizations don’t make the investment in a coherent data protection strategy that can help them avoid this problem.
There are number of factors you need to consider when deciding on a data backup strategy. We discuss a few key ones here. For more information, contact one of our consultants.
Recovery Time Objective (RTO): This is one of the most fundamental considerations when developing your backup strategy. The basic question you are asking yourself here is, “how quickly must I be able to get my data restored and application back online after a disaster happens?” The answer usually depends on the business impact the loss of that data has on your critical business functions.
Recovery Point Objective (RPO): This is the second most fundamental factor you must consider. The basic question you are asking yourself here is, “how recent does my backup copy have to be?” For some applications, like online banking, the answer may be milliseconds. For other applications, such as payroll data, maybe a week old copy is good enough.
Backup Medium: Your choice of backup medium is important as there are always tradeoffs in terms of reliability, speed, manual intervention, security, portability, and manageability when choosing the medium on to which you will backup your data. Tape is one of the cheapest mediums when backing up a very large volume of data, but tape has a number of inherent problems that make it unsuitable for some customers.
Storage Location: Where you store your backed up data is usually a trade off of cost versus convenience. Keeping your backups onsite in your office or in the boot of your car may be convenient, but these locations are less than ideal in terms of data security and reliability of the backup. If there is a fire in your office, your production data and your backups will both be destroyed when kept onsite. Storing backups in the boot of your car, or transporting them physically anywhere, opens them up to being lost, stolen, or damaged by handling and heat. Electronic transfer and storage of encrypted data is now the best practise used by both large and small organizations.
Security: Let’s be clear, if you are not encrypting your backups, you are taking an enormous risk. Your backups usually contain your company’s most vital information including financial data, intellectual property, trade secrets, and customer data. If this data is lost or stolen you may not be able to recover from the financial and reputational damage that it could cause.
Bare Metal Restore (BMR): Bare metal restore refers to the ability to not just restore the data of a destroyed server, but to also automatically restore the operating system, system states, drivers, and applications of that server in as few easy steps as possible. All BMR solutions require the installation of some kind of base operating system, whether it be Windows or a Linux core. Some backup solutions have BMR capability built in.