Moreover, duplicate data is becoming more and more prevalent. At the same time that network storage is growing tremendously, users are becoming more and more dependent on having access to their information anywhere. With Internet access virtually ever-present today, users want to be able to access their data wherever they are and from a variety of devices, including smartphones, tablets and laptops.
As hardware and software evolve, organizations have become less and less tolerant of downtime. Virtualization is continuing to take a larger share of the market, offering several effective solutions to minimize downtime. Various virtualization products on the market offer high-availability and fault tolerance options. With such solutions in place, entire physical servers can fail without end-users even noticing. New versions of Microsoft servers, such as Exchange 2010 have introduced easy-to-use and easy-to-deploy high availability. These are ideal solutions for companies, but they set an expectation of 100 percent availability. They also require special attention when planning your data backup and recovery procedure. Backing up and restoring a virtual machine requires specific knowledge and procedures. Make sure to read up on all the information available to ensure you are following the vendor’s best practice.
Creating a formal document is crucial to any IT department’s data backup and recovery strategy. Interview your team members and company executives to determine the most critical data within your organization. If your office were to disappear tomorrow, what are the first things employees would need to access? Is it your email, database or a particular folder on your network? Whatever it is, there needs to be a plan in place to get the most business critical systems up and running as fast as possible (recovery time objective) with as little data loss as possible (recovery point objective).
Consider your recovery time objective. Many CEOs believe they need everything to be up and running immediately in the event of a disaster, but with limited budgets and out-of-control data, that is not feasible. Determining your RTO is not just a technical conversation; it involves all aspects of your organization. What type of solution can you afford? How much downtime is actually acceptable? Once you determine how long your company can go without access to business critical applications and how long it can go without the rest, you can start to see how your data backup and recovery solution is going to look. The lower the RTO, the more costly your solution is going to be. In today’s disaster recovery-oriented world, there are a lot of options and solutions out there; every business should be able to find something that fits its requirements.
Another important consideration is how much data you can afford to lose in the event of a disaster. Your recovery point objective, or RPO, is vital to know when creating a data backup and recovery strategy. For example, if you back up your Exchange server at 10:00 p.m. on Tuesday night and it fails 5:00 p.m. on Wednesday, you are going to lose 19 hours worth of email. Is that acceptable? It depends on your organization and its needs. If it isn’t acceptable, you need to make sure that you are backing it up more frequently or considering alternative solutions such as replication or clustering in order to ensure that you can meet your RPO in the event of a disaster.
Your data backup and recovery plan needs to clearly state all aspects of the data backup and recovery process. What technologies are you using to protect the various components of your environment? How often do your backups run for specific data sets? Do certain applications need to be real time replicated in order to meet your RTO and RPO?
One common among organizations is that new data is added or a folder is moved, which is then no longer being protected. If you are using a tape-based backup solution or if you are backing up to the cloud, it is likely you selected specific folders when setting up your backup jobs. What happens when a new folder or server is added? It is very important to frequently review your backup selections to ensure all your critical data is being protected.
Having a data backup plan is one important piece of the puzzle but even more important, is your plan to recover that data. If you work for an SMB, it is likely that you are not replicating, in real time, your entire server environment to a secondary data center that can fail over seamlessly at the push of a button. Therefore, it is critical to have a plan in place to recover that data and make it available to your end users. So how are your users going to access that data in the event of a disaster? If your office is destroyed, where are the employees going to go and how are you going to ensure that they can access your servers with minimal technical skills? How are you going to communicate with them if your phones are down? This part of the plan is going to be determined by a variety of influences and factors.
A lot of SMBs have their data backed up offsite but have nowhere to recover if they were to lose their office. In this scenario, hardware would have to be ordered, operating systems and applications installed, and then, finally, their data put back on top of it. This can be a very lengthy and painful process. One option that has emerged in the last few years is virtual disaster recovery.
