Data backup and recovery is vital to the operation of your business. Make sure you are doing it correctly. The last thing you need is to be using important resources to backup your data only to find out you cannot recover it when you need it.
Reliability.
Up to 71% of restores from tape contain failures.
Best Practice: Use disk-to-disk technology for backups. With disk-to-disk technology, your backup data resides on disk drives, proven to be far more reliable than tapes. When your backup completes, you know the data is secure and accessible on the disk drive. With tapes you never really know if your data is usable until you try to restore it, at which point it’s too late.
Breadth of Offering.
Choice in product and service offerings meet your business’ needs.
Best Practice: Don’t settle for less than what you need. Vendor offerings vary widely. Some are designed primarily for consumers and others for enterprise data centers. Choose a solution that scales (see scalability below), and offers the features you need to provide the level of service you expect. De-duplication and delta-block technologies will improve performance, reduce your data footprint and save you money. Find out if their de-duplication offering is at the file level or the block level. Make sure the solution can back up servers, PCs, and laptops as well your applications.
Security.
60% of organizations using tapes don’t encrypt their backups.
Best Practice: End-to-end encryption with no “back door.” Using encryption with tape makes backups run slowly and often takes too long to fit within a backup window. As a result, most people simply turn encryption off, creating a security risk. Even with the physical safety of disk-todisk backup, encryption is essential. Look for 256-bit AES. Find a solution that encrypts your data during transmission and storage. Make certain there isn’t a “back door” that would let someone else view your data.
Accessibility.
Companies waste thousands of hours waiting on tapes.
Best Practice: Ensure that you can get your data back with minimal delay. You should have direct access to your backups, with no time spent on physical transport (no trucks, no warehouses). Your restores should take minutes, not hours or days. Set yourself up to work with your data, not wait for it. Make sure your solution provider can meet your Return-to-Operations (RTO) and Recovery Point Objectives (RPO) which determine how quickly you can recover your
data and maintain business continuity. Inquire about onsite and offsite replication that provide both improved performance and a solid disaster recovery strategy.
For more information on data backup and recovery best practices call me at 757.646.1529.
Information supplied by EVault.