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News Release from: Storage Expo | Subject: Storage Expo 2006
Edited by the Manufacturingtalk Editorial
Team on 10 October 2006
Burgeoning data volumes cause increasing
disquiet
Backup, the whole backup and nothing but the backup
Headline-making disasters like 2005's Hurricane Katrina have highlighted the need for more sophisticated disaster recovery (DR) plans for even the smallest and newest of organisations The need to back up has hit the boardroom, as access to information 24/7 from a variety of locations has become a business-critical issue
This article was originally published on Manufacturingtalk on 11 Jul 2006 at 8.00am (UK)
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Successful Backups are Not Enough
Data protection requirements have moved on from the purely technical question of "Did the backup work?" to the much more complex question of "Is my business protected?"
Do I really need to archive all this email?
Storage managers are waking up to the realisation that they need to dedicate a large amount of storage to email.
Data loss comes in all shapes and sizes.
It might be the result of accidental deletion, corruptions, viruses, hardware failure or site disasters.
Whatever the cause, it can severely damage the reputation of the company and put the business out of action for days or even weeks.
Further reading
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Meeting the needs of modern healthcare delivery
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Top four business reasons for email archiving
Email generated by the corporate world continues to grow dramatically and storage-related costs of email are an escalating concern for IT executives.
So what must the board consider when planning for the worst?.
Digital data volumes are set to grow 30 percent in the coming two years.
But burgeoning data volumes are only a part of the problem.
Far more serious is the fact that a large proportion of corporate information is distributed across numerous data media such as departmental servers, desktop and laptop PCs and, more recently, also employees' PDAs and memory sticks.
In many cases, administrators no longer have any control over where individual staff members store their data or whether these are backed up on a regular basis.
And, as if that is not enough, many IT managers are in store for a rude awakening in the coming years when new rules such as Basel II - whose rule set includes fixed elements such as risk provisions for data protection - take effect.
While the US Sarbanes Oxley Act limits itself to companies listed on the US stock market, it nevertheless serves as a strong driver for this target group to invest heavily in data security.
And overall, there is a clear trend towards increasingly rigorous sector specific regulations for industries such as pharmaceuticals, banking and insurance.
In other words, while the data torrents continue to rise and become increasingly diversified, IT managers have the challenging task of identifying vital data files and backing them up centrally and regularly, then archiving the backups so that they are protected effectively from natural disasters.
Iron Mountain is a specialist in this interaction between collecting, backing up and archiving physical company folders and digital data.
The issue of continuous data protection is becoming increasingly prominent in the digital world.
A modern CDP concept encompasses the entire data protection process - from continuous data backups and the constant removal of data to safe external locations, to archiving the entire data history for any desired period of time.
The ability to reconstruct data immediately on an on demand basis is also a part of this CDP concept.
Iron Mountain Digital, the technology unit of Iron Mountain, has implemented the concept of continuous data protection in its LiveVault service - an application that continually backs up data on distributed corporate branch office and departmental servers and saves them securely and centrally to a backup server.
Because backups are near continuous, companies can restore a data snapshot from almost any desired moment in the past.
Although distributed servers often accommodate masses of abandoned data, information stored on employees' desktop and laptop PCs represents a far more serious problem because it changes daily, is more mobile (therefore at greater risk) and often includes sensitive customer data.
In recent months the problem has been underscored by numerous incidents where loss of an individual laptop/PC has involved the loss of significant amounts of customer data.
These high profile incidents oblige the parent company to disclose the loss and risk giving rise to damaging publicity.
In the US one lost hard disk contained unencrypted personal information relating to 26.5 million former and active military personnel.
In such situations, Iron Mountain Digital's DataDefense and Connected Backup/PC services offers an optimal solution.
This application contains ingeneous functionality that enables data on stolen or lost desktop and laptop PCs to be deleted on an actions-driven basis, even if the machine concerned is offline.
Besides the loss of vital data, a further critical factor is beginning to crystallise as a potential source capable of causing entire business operations to grind to a halt: an email system outage.
Often, failures of just a few hours can lead to smarting revenue losses, not to mention the damage caused to the company's image.
Such failures, however, can be avoided far more simply than many suspect - by using Iron Mountain Digital's easy to install Email Continuity Service.
This application is a secondary, highly scalable standby email system that ensures permanent email access and fault tolerant email communication, also for Blackberries and other mobile devices.
The Email Continuity Service can be activated within a few minutes following a failure of the primary corporate email system (or parts of it).
The cause of the system failure has no influence whatsoever on the correct functioning of the service.
Within minutes, all affected users are reconnected to a fully functional Web based email system that allows them to send and receive emails using their regular email accounts.
The system also allows access to all data stored on the primary system - such as contact lists, calendar entries or distribution lists.
In this way, it can be guaranteed that email - one of the most important communication means in today's business world - is always available.
According to estimates, three out of five companies that suffer system failures longer than 48 hours go out of business after approximately three years.
The way in which companies operates their own IT systems is evidently a good indicator of the quality of their plant management.
This should be food for thought for many companies because, if the theory is correct, many of them won't survive the coming years.
Iron Mountain Digital is exhibiting at Storage Expo 2006 the UK's largest and most important event dedicated to data storage.
Now in its 6th year, the show features a comprehensive FREE education programme and over 90 exhibitors at the National Hall, Olympia, London from 18 - 19 October 2006.
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