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Peter Eicher, Senior Product Manager, Syncsort Incorporated

As one-third of large organisations worldwide plan to increase the amount of sensitive information they store abroad, in search of a more cost-effective option than their home countries, the risk to their data will increase exponentially. It is for reasons such as this that large global enterprises spend an average of £600k on data security – investing heavily in firewalls, data encryption and CCTV to protect themselves from threats of physical theft and sabotage – otherwise known as “Plan A.”

Whilst, possible data loss can occur through many different scenarios, including natural disasters or human error, where it can be difficult to pre-empt how an organisation will react, companies must look to develop a “Plan B,” which would cover the next possible steps if all data is lost.

Planning for data loss

Disaster recovery planning is vital to businesses worldwide and the importance of having a plan in place is about more than mitigating the financial threat of a disaster. A disaster recovery plan allows an organisation to prepare for the recovery or continuation of data after a natural or human induced disaster. Such a plan should involve a business impact analysis, understanding and quantifying the associated risks, as well as classifying and prioritising applications and data.

Furthermore, organisations have a legal and ethical responsibility to protect data and need to have a plan in place to recover information when it is lost. For example, in France, AFNOR has set guidelines for business continuity for all communication technologies and information. Similar examples can be found worldwide as government regulations are mandating business continuity and disaster recovery plans for organisations in various sectors of the economy.

Instant availability of data

One of the biggest threats to a business in the event of mass data loss is the downtime experienced in order to recover. A recent survey shows that European organisations are collectively losing more than 17 billion Euros in revenue and almost one million hours of IT downtime every year. Furthermore, sales departments are one of the worst affected, as 42 percent of sales representatives are unable to carry on with their day-to-day tasks.

Planners must therefore look for options that can deliver instant access to data when researching the technology solutions for disaster recovery. The most efficient solutions are those which can track changed blocks of data below the file system, with no impact on the Central Processing Unit (CPU) or application performance at backup. The advantage of using this method is that the blocks can then be used as snapshots, enabling the recovery of files, applications, operating systems and servers – in a matter of minutes.

The importance of disaster recovery testing

Once critical data assets of a company have been identified, the objectives have been set for their timely recovery, and the right recovery solutions to safeguard and restore the assets have been identified, planners must then turn their attention to disaster recovery testing.

This can often be a major challenge for most IT departments. If recovery is not regularly tested all the way to the application level, it is very likely that unforeseen problems will occur. IT environments are dynamic, and therefore the plan must be maintained and updated every time an element within the IT environment is changed.

However, a vast majority of companies test their disaster recovery plans only once a year and failure rates are much higher than they should be even after testing has occurred. Allowing testing to become an afterthought in the disaster recovery process will significantly increase the overall cost of maintaining the plan and the likelihood of failure following a disaster. This is because companies who do not test regularly lack visibility into whether the critical data is being recovered first, and if the right infrastructure, people and processes exist to re-host data and applications during recovery.

A successful plan requires investment in not only the necessary technology solutions, but also the expert training and guidance. For example, some data protection vendors offer a testing service which is made up of a collaborative effort between a skilled team of professionals and the customer team. The use of this approach utilises the customer’s knowledge of their own systems and the vendor’s experience, therefore ensuring not only that testing is carried out regularly, but also that the customer’s IT staff receive the necessary training required to get the job done.

Choosing the optimal disaster recovery solution

As data is central to the success and profitability of a business, selecting the correct recovery tools is critical to business continuity. However, disasters do not occur frequently and therefore disaster recovery systems are often seen as highly cost-inefficient tools by budget holders. Removing disaster recovery systems is not an option. And as IT budgets shrink, planners are increasingly being asked to select solutions which can also function during periods of standby and can work together with standard IT operations such as storage and back-up. Some tools can provide significant value outside of disaster scenarios if they are able to easily and non-disruptively make snapshot-based data available for common IT procedures such as patch testing, software development and reporting. There are many steps to be considered, however solutions which can be properly integrated with the disaster recovery plan and are specifically geared to reduce down-time will ultimately produce the best results.