Creating an Effective Backup and Recovery Strategy

By Tom Schmidt

No matter how good your network is, data loss and system crashes are inevitable. And no matter what the cause, when vital business information isn't available, every minute down costs you money. According to Infonetics Research, large companies lose up to 16% of their annual revenue due to unplanned network downtime. That's why you need to have a backup and system recovery strategy that gets you back up and running within minutes, not hours or days.

This article will explore ways in which IT departments, which today confront a growing number of "pain points," can rapidly back up and recover virtually any data and system.

The growing challenges to IT

For IT departments everywhere, the challenge has never been clearer: they must support the business goals of the enterprise by ensuring the security and accessibility of its information assets. Anything that disrupts this security and accessibility creates downtime, and downtime costs companies money. And when disruptions do occur, IT needs to get the enterprise restarted and restored to the "moment before" state as rapidly as possible, without risk of repeating the same failure.

But as every IT department knows, the ability to get the enterprise up and running again can be profoundly complicated. Take, for instance, the exponential growth in data volumes. According to a 2004 survey by Horison Information Strategies, a consulting firm that researches the storage market, the amount of corporate data is increasing at an average rate of 50 percent to 70 percent every year.

Consider, too, the impact of an evolving regulatory climate. To give just one example, Section 409 of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act explicitly requires companies to make "rapid and current" disclosures concerning "material changes" to their financial conditions. A number of industry observers have interpreted "rapid and current" to mean 48 hours, noting that rapid recovery will be used increasingly as a measurement of the soundness of a company's records management.

Then, of course, there's today's quickly changing cyber threat environment. As the recent Zotob worm demonstrated, the speed at which hackers are able to take advantage of newly disclosed software flaws makes it vital for companies to look beyond patching to broader and more holistic measures for controlling vulnerabilities. The fast-moving Zotob arrived just days after Microsoft patched a hole in the Windows Plug and Play service.

Together, these challenges make it clear that never has it been so critical for companies to be able to reliably back up and recover their data and systems.

A united approach

In the past, companies were often forced to choose between fast backups and quick recovery. That's no longer the case. It is now possible to create backups and restore to specific system recovery points quickly, ensuring that, in the event of a crash, mission-critical servers are promptly brought back online. Here's how the combination of the two solutions enables you to maintain data availability while minimizing server downtime:

• D2D2T Backups A multi-stage, disk-to-disk-to-tape-based data protection solution offers significant benefits over traditional backup media, such as tape drives and tape libraries. These benefits include faster backup; improved media reliability; reduced total cost of ownership (TCO); and reduced IT intervention and management.
• Recovery The latest recovery solutions enable users to recover systems quickly and reliably with low-level images of the entire logical disk structure, serialized and written to a single file. Recovery solutions may be used for the following:
• Bare metal system recovery. Depending on the amount of data, a server with applications, settings, and data can often be recovered in less time than it would take to reinstall the operating system alone.
• Change management. Before a change is applied, a system can be backed up while still online. An administrator can also prompt an up-to-the-minute incremental just before the change is applied. If problems occur due to the new change, such as adding a device or installing a patch, a recovery solution will enable a full recovery back to the most recent incremental backup.
• Database backups. IT administrators can back up both Microsoft VSS-compliant databases and those that are not VSS compliant.

Conclusion

The ongoing explosive growth in data, combined with increased system availability requirements, has resulted in a greater-than-ever strain on IT organizations to provide the necessary data protection in the face of ever-shrinking backup windows. A simplified and automated process for preparing for and recovering all data and system information from a point-in-time backup due to a disaster is key to keeping a business up, running, and growing.

Tom Schmidt writes frequently about information security topics. He has more than 15 years' experience as a writer and editor in high-tech publishing.