You update your business software,
launch new technology and roll out
advanced applications to be sure your company’s IT environment is cutting
edge, but have you stopped to consider
how you will back up your systems? What
happens when accidents occur and data is
lost?
“As organizations implement new servers
and applications, and add more storage to
support these systems, their backup and
recovery is not necessarily being kept up to
date,” says Geoff Hanson, Practice Director for Pomeroy IT Solutions in Hebron,
Ky. “You want to know where the data is
that you have to recover, you need processes and procedures in place to recover that
data, and you want to do all of this in a
timely fashion with zero data loss.”
As privacy issues become more important
to businesses in the wake of security regulations, this backed-up data must be stored
safely, so it can’t be accessed by unauthorized users. Today, disk storage and virtual
tape libraries are ways to update backup
and recovery infrastructure.
Smart Business asked Hanson to discuss
how to protect the data that is critical to
carrying out day-to-day business with an
efficient backup and recovery system.
Traditionally, how have companies backed
up and recovered data from their computer
systems?
Until recently, most companies were
using tape media to back up and restore
data. A company would back up storage
onto tape, and then that tape was taken to
an off-site location for protection. In the
event a company had to recover data, it
had to wait until the tape was retrieved
from off-site storage. Backup and recovery
was a very manual process. There were
days and/or hours associated with a company’s recovery time. Today, companies
are moving toward disk-to-disk storage
instead of tape. Disk provides quicker
recovery capabilities and virtually zero
data loss. It’s important to note that today’s
backup and recovery software applications are relatively mature. It’s the infrastructure to support the software (the tape) that hasn’t necessarily been kept up
to date.
What infrastructure is available today that
speeds up recovery time?
First, companies can opt for a virtual tape
library (VTL) appliance. This infrastructure
allows you to move your backup strategy
to a disk-based solution. Many companies
use tape for their backup solution. A VTL
replaces the tape device with a disk-based
solution. There is minimal change in the
backup process. The same backup software can be used; the information is simply transferred to disk instead. Recovery is
faster because you avoid the lag time associated with tape media and the retrieval
from off-site storage. Another approach is
disk-to-disk-to-tape backup. Companies
are replicating their disk arrays to either
local or remote disk arrays and then backing up the data to either VTLs or tape.
What are other advantages of disk storage?
Your backup is only as good as the last
piece of information that was backed up.
Some companies only back up at night on
a 24-hour cycle. If they experience a hardware malfunction and lose their data, they
must recover information that was current
as of the night before, therefore losing a
day’s worth of work. That can represent a
serious loss in productivity and revenues
for some businesses. People are moving
toward disk storage because they can
restore information quickly and improve
recovery time.
What should a company consider in choosing
an appropriate backup and recovery system?
The first question is, how much time can
you afford to be down? If you are a financial company and every minute a server is
down you lose money, you can’t afford to
be down at all. In this case, you need a
high-availability solution and a backup and
recovery infrastructure to support uptime
for your critical applications. Also, you
should review your current best practices
for managing data. How will you meet all
regulations and requirements? What information has to be available to you at all
times for you to be successful?
Can you talk more about security requirements? How does backup and recovery help
businesses comply with regulations?
Companies are taking more notice to privacy due to regulatory and security
requirements on their data and information. They are stepping back and asking
how they can recover quicker with no data
loss. Companies are moving toward data
encryption for data at rest as well as data in
transit. For example, hospitals must meet
HIPAA requirements. When backing up
medical files, this information must be
secure regardless of where it is stored.
Financial companies must also consider
privacy issues in lieu of Sarbanes-Oxley
requirements associated with data protection. So, it is important to architect privacy
of content while implementing infrastructure for backup and recovery.
GEOFF HANSON is practice director at Pomeroy IT Solutions in
Hebron, Ky. Reach him at [email protected] or (623) 551-5771.