New technologies and recent storm reports have forced many companies to review disaster recovery plans and data protection policies.
Hurricanes striking the Gulf Coast and Eastern seashore have a significant impact on the businesses operating in their path.
Hurricanes Katrina and Rita have IT managers and company owners all over the United States evaluating or creating disaster recovery plans.
They recognize the need to be prepared for what would otherwise be a devastating scenario.
Many companies that were very diligent in protecting their data to tape or disk onsite found their offsite protection was inadequate.
Some had a total data loss as a direct consequence of a natural disaster.
An example of this occurred in Houston, when Tropical Storm Allison hit in June 2001.
The threat this storm posed was widely dismissed.
No one foresaw the disastrous impact it would have on Houston businesses.
During the height of the storm, the basements of many corporate, governmental and medical buildings flooded.
The basements of these buildings housed power equipment, computer mainframes, and data storage for medical research.
Many of these basements were connected by tunnels and walkways, so when one basement flooded, the adjacent buildings flooded as well.
This created a disastrous domino effect that either damaged or completely destroyed computer rooms.
Years of tape and data storage of medical research were lost.
In this instance, inadequate preparation caused data recovery to be expensive or impossible.
Many of the organizations affected by this disaster have made changes to their infrastructure and disaster recovery plans.
Moving centralized computer systems and emergency power backup equipment out of the basements was a starting point.
Most of these organizations have also incorporated remote data backup into their disaster recovery plan.
Several of these high profile stories were from large Fortune 500 companies that have money and resources to recover from a disaster.
Small and medium businesses must plan ahead if they are to survive a site disaster.
Here are some things to think about when putting together a disaster recovery plan.
It is by no means a comprehensive list; each business has its unique requirements:Once you've established the relative priority of your business applications you need to determine your recovery objectives for each category of data.
Identify potential data loss events that can happen to your business.
Develop a plan to minimize the impact of these events.
Create a chart or correlation that identifies the recovery objectives (RTO and RPO) for each class of application relative to the scope of the data loss event.
For instance, a lost file may have a RTO of 15 minutes.
If the file is lost due to a site disaster, the first 4 hours may be dedicated to the safety of your employees and your data RTO may be hours or days instead of minutes.
Define your backup system in accordance with your data recovery goals and budget.
Designate an emergency response team and educate them on their role in bringing the company back online after a disaster.
Businesses of all sizes have become increasingly dependent on data for their very existence.
A large number of the companies affected by the recent hurricanes were small to medium businesses.
Only the ones that were prepared for a disaster will reopen their doors.
Some of the less fortunate businesses did not have their data (backup tape) in an off-site location or had it in a nearby location that was also devastated by the same disaster.
Even with a disaster recovery plan in place, companies are still faced with the possibility that their data cannot be restored due to corrupted data on disks or tapes.
The following passage, retrieved from the National Archives and Records Administration in Washington, D.
C.
, is an eye-opening statistic regarding business continuity.
93% of companies that lost their data center for 10 days or more due to a disaster filed for bankruptcy within one year of the disaster.
50% of businesses that found themselves without data management for this same time period filed for bankruptcy immediately.
Companies that backup their data to a secure off-site location can move their operations to a new location and continue their business as usual.
The companies who are prepared with a comprehensive disaster recovery plan, including an offsite backup of there data, are much better prepared to deal with a catastrophe.
Those companies will be the ones that endure this type of extreme event.
When choosing or evaluating your backup solution, pay particular attention to the type of media you are using.
A nationwide study has shown that: Over 34% of companies do not test their backups and of those that tested 77% found their tape backups fail to recover.
(Storage Magazine)Nearly 50% of tape-based backup fail to restore correctly.
(Gartner Group) Tape-based backup systems are difficult to administer, and as you can see from the above statistics, often fail to restore your data.
Tapes appear to be a sturdy media on the surface; however, according to an industry leading tape manufacturer's specifications, tapes must be stored between 41 and 89 degrees and 20-60 percent relative humidity.
Tape rotations require human intervention, and with that you get inherent errors and a flawed process.
If you choose to use tape to store your data, make sure your tapes are safe and working with the following procedures:
All indications are that backups were successful until you try to restore.
If you want to continue to use tapes as your primary backup, consider using an off-site backup service as a secondary backup solution, just in case your primary backup system fails.
Remember, redundancy is the key to data protection.
Most of our clients were not aware a cost effective automated off-site data protection solution existed.
Some were not convinced they needed to store their data off-site in a safe and secure location.
A fireproof safe seems like a good location to store your tapes, but two problems exist with that solution.
First, in the event of a fire, your office will be inaccessible for several days while the fire marshal determines the cause.
Secondly, fireproof safes are not necessarily water proof and tapes that are exposed to damp or wet conditions may not be readable.
Off-site data vaulting is not just for large companies with multiple data centers.
It is a data protection strategy that should be employed by all organizations regardless of their size.
Secure Backup's off-site data vaulting service can scale to meet all of the data protection needs in your customer's environment, whether it is preserving and protecting an individual PC or the corporate server farm.
This scalability combined with the automated remote vaulting of data creates a powerful data protection solution that plays a key role in your customer's disaster recovery planning.
In conclusion, data storage and disaster recovery are two important factors in managing business continuity.
Today companies cannot operate without their business applications and data.
Owners and managers of businesses, who do not place a high value on the importance of their company's data, risk the financial future and viability of the organization.
The company's historical and current data is its life blood.
Without data protection and disaster recovery policies in place, a company risks the possibility of not being able to recover from a data loss event.
Whether it is caused by human error, a disgruntled employee, hardware or software failures, or even worse, a fire or natural disaster, you need to be prepared.
Hurricanes striking the Gulf Coast and Eastern seashore have a significant impact on the businesses operating in their path.
Hurricanes Katrina and Rita have IT managers and company owners all over the United States evaluating or creating disaster recovery plans.
They recognize the need to be prepared for what would otherwise be a devastating scenario.
Many companies that were very diligent in protecting their data to tape or disk onsite found their offsite protection was inadequate.
Some had a total data loss as a direct consequence of a natural disaster.
An example of this occurred in Houston, when Tropical Storm Allison hit in June 2001.
The threat this storm posed was widely dismissed.
No one foresaw the disastrous impact it would have on Houston businesses.
During the height of the storm, the basements of many corporate, governmental and medical buildings flooded.
The basements of these buildings housed power equipment, computer mainframes, and data storage for medical research.
Many of these basements were connected by tunnels and walkways, so when one basement flooded, the adjacent buildings flooded as well.
This created a disastrous domino effect that either damaged or completely destroyed computer rooms.
Years of tape and data storage of medical research were lost.
In this instance, inadequate preparation caused data recovery to be expensive or impossible.
Many of the organizations affected by this disaster have made changes to their infrastructure and disaster recovery plans.
Moving centralized computer systems and emergency power backup equipment out of the basements was a starting point.
Most of these organizations have also incorporated remote data backup into their disaster recovery plan.
Several of these high profile stories were from large Fortune 500 companies that have money and resources to recover from a disaster.
Small and medium businesses must plan ahead if they are to survive a site disaster.
Here are some things to think about when putting together a disaster recovery plan.
It is by no means a comprehensive list; each business has its unique requirements:
- Prioritize your business needs and identify each class of data.
Determine which services need to be restored immediately and which ones are less critical.
- Mission Critical
- Business Critical
- Operationally important
- Recovery Time Objective (RTO) - The time objective to bring the system back on line following a failure
- Recovery Point Objective (RPO) - The acceptable amount of data loss from the last good backup prior to the point of failure
Develop a plan to minimize the impact of these events.
- File loss (83%) - Due to human error, overwrite, etc.
- File loss (10%) - Due to corruption from viruses, application error, etc.
- Storage loss (5%) - Failure of primary storage, corrupt raid, bad hard drive, etc.
- Site loss (2%) - Site disaster, fire, flooding, etc.
- Server loss (1%) - CPU failure, theft, various catastrophes, etc.
For instance, a lost file may have a RTO of 15 minutes.
If the file is lost due to a site disaster, the first 4 hours may be dedicated to the safety of your employees and your data RTO may be hours or days instead of minutes.
- Determine what data needs to be backed up and how many generations you need to store.
- Establish a backup schedule to meet your recovery objectives.
- Maintain a copy of your back up data offsite that will meet your data recovery goals.
For example, if you can only afford to lose 24 hours worth of data then taking a tape offsite every Friday does not meet that goal.
- Make a list of emergency contact information for all employees.
Make sure you know how to contact them and they know how to contact you. - Make a list of critical vendors and their emergency contact information.
- Make a list of vendors for replacement computer and operating equipment that is necessary to resume business.
- Make a list of possible replacement sites.
Businesses of all sizes have become increasingly dependent on data for their very existence.
A large number of the companies affected by the recent hurricanes were small to medium businesses.
Only the ones that were prepared for a disaster will reopen their doors.
Some of the less fortunate businesses did not have their data (backup tape) in an off-site location or had it in a nearby location that was also devastated by the same disaster.
Even with a disaster recovery plan in place, companies are still faced with the possibility that their data cannot be restored due to corrupted data on disks or tapes.
The following passage, retrieved from the National Archives and Records Administration in Washington, D.
C.
, is an eye-opening statistic regarding business continuity.
93% of companies that lost their data center for 10 days or more due to a disaster filed for bankruptcy within one year of the disaster.
50% of businesses that found themselves without data management for this same time period filed for bankruptcy immediately.
Companies that backup their data to a secure off-site location can move their operations to a new location and continue their business as usual.
The companies who are prepared with a comprehensive disaster recovery plan, including an offsite backup of there data, are much better prepared to deal with a catastrophe.
Those companies will be the ones that endure this type of extreme event.
When choosing or evaluating your backup solution, pay particular attention to the type of media you are using.
A nationwide study has shown that: Over 34% of companies do not test their backups and of those that tested 77% found their tape backups fail to recover.
(Storage Magazine)Nearly 50% of tape-based backup fail to restore correctly.
(Gartner Group) Tape-based backup systems are difficult to administer, and as you can see from the above statistics, often fail to restore your data.
Tapes appear to be a sturdy media on the surface; however, according to an industry leading tape manufacturer's specifications, tapes must be stored between 41 and 89 degrees and 20-60 percent relative humidity.
Tape rotations require human intervention, and with that you get inherent errors and a flawed process.
If you choose to use tape to store your data, make sure your tapes are safe and working with the following procedures:
- Clean your tape drives once a month.
- Replace tape media regularly.
- Rotate your backup tapes off-site every night via a bonded vaulting provider, while keeping them close enough that they are easily accessible.
- Test and restore once a month.
- Keep at least a 20 quantity backup rotation.
- Have easy access to your backup software if you have to re-install it.
- Make sure your data is fully encrypted before being written to tape.
All indications are that backups were successful until you try to restore.
If you want to continue to use tapes as your primary backup, consider using an off-site backup service as a secondary backup solution, just in case your primary backup system fails.
Remember, redundancy is the key to data protection.
Most of our clients were not aware a cost effective automated off-site data protection solution existed.
Some were not convinced they needed to store their data off-site in a safe and secure location.
A fireproof safe seems like a good location to store your tapes, but two problems exist with that solution.
First, in the event of a fire, your office will be inaccessible for several days while the fire marshal determines the cause.
Secondly, fireproof safes are not necessarily water proof and tapes that are exposed to damp or wet conditions may not be readable.
Off-site data vaulting is not just for large companies with multiple data centers.
It is a data protection strategy that should be employed by all organizations regardless of their size.
Secure Backup's off-site data vaulting service can scale to meet all of the data protection needs in your customer's environment, whether it is preserving and protecting an individual PC or the corporate server farm.
This scalability combined with the automated remote vaulting of data creates a powerful data protection solution that plays a key role in your customer's disaster recovery planning.
In conclusion, data storage and disaster recovery are two important factors in managing business continuity.
Today companies cannot operate without their business applications and data.
Owners and managers of businesses, who do not place a high value on the importance of their company's data, risk the financial future and viability of the organization.
The company's historical and current data is its life blood.
Without data protection and disaster recovery policies in place, a company risks the possibility of not being able to recover from a data loss event.
Whether it is caused by human error, a disgruntled employee, hardware or software failures, or even worse, a fire or natural disaster, you need to be prepared.
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