Features

Traditionally, many data-protection and business-continuance plans have relied on internal staff to perform data backups, using in-house tapes and then physically transporting the tapes off-site to a backup data center. With the reach and capacity of today’s networks, as well as the advancements in storage technologies, companies now have the ability to leverage their IP network infrastructure to move storage traffic. The network has now become the key enabler of business applications, and one of the applications available today is IP-based remote data backup.

In today’s information-driven organizations, the costs to generate, keep available and recover data are staggering. Many businesses today depend on 99.9999% data availability to keep business-critical functions operational. With such a reliance on data, the costs of interrupted access or loss of data could damage the financial viability of an organization, and, in some cases, leave no room for recovery. The consequences of such downtime are too risky.

According to a Gartner Group study, the average downtime cost for businesses across all industries is more than $1 million per hour. The Computer Security Institute adds that it costs, on average, $32,000 per stolen machine to replace data and proprietary information.

Despite market data, only a fraction of businesses are fully prepared for everyday threats, not to mention catastrophic disasters. According to a Wall Street Journal report, more than 83% of all critical data lost is due to some form of human error, 64% from human mistakes and 19% from internal sabotage within an organization. Losses from these everyday acts of negligence and violence can be just as catastrophic to a business as a natural or man-made disaster.

In addition, as businesses become more geographically dispersed, so does data. With the increase in branch offices and the growing popularity of telecommuting, the complexity of protecting data across multiple locations has increased. About 80% of U.S. enterprise sites (about 1.5 million) are classified as remote locations or branch offices, with little to no IT support or backup experience.

Only one third of distributed enterprises, and just one fifth of small and midsize businesses, perform data backups at remote offices. This represents hundreds of thousands of remote business offices currently not backed up remotely or to a centralized facility.

Ip offers new choices
With the continued decentralization of data across the enterprise, many of the measures and investments put in place to protect corporate data have been effectively negated. In the past, IT managers backed up databases, files or data sets after business hours and moved copies to remote storage archives via shipment of removable media (e.g., magnetic tape or optical disks). This created extended periods where important data was not protected until the next backup cycle, slowed recovery times (tapes must be physically transported to and from remote sites), increased the risk of damage to tape media that prevents recovering data, and ultimately resulted in an inconsistent recovery ability due to uncertainties in the quality of specific backups–where failure rates can approach 60%.

One option available today is remote data backup, which can provide data-protection service for multiple remotely located servers and laptops or workstations by backing up data to a secure centralized location on a daily basis. Remote data backup can provide customers the security of a full backup every day, with a lower impact on the target server and network than a traditional incremental backup.

Backups that previously took hours can now be completed in minutes, requiring only a small fraction of the actual data on a server to be copied in order to protect it, while retaining the ability to restore, as if a full backup had been made. Remote data backup can deliver users secure, bandwidth-efficient, network-based backup-and-restore service for enterprises and their branch offices, and small and midsized businesses that have servers, workstations and laptops lacking in guaranteed enterprise-class data protection.

Based on content addressable and advanced compression technologies, remote data backup solutions are efficient in both bandwidth and storage space. As a result, storage and bandwidth cost savings can help organizations justify backing up more of their data than previously thought possible, and with a higher level of data protection and recoverability in the event of an outage or disaster.

Remote data backup delivers data protection service for multiple remotely located servers and laptops or workstations by backing up data to a secure centralized location on a daily basis. This type of service can offer more efficiency–in both bandwidth and storage space requirements–than traditional backup systems. As a result, remote data backup can provide customers the security of a full backup every day with a lower impact on the target server and network than a traditional incremental backup.

what to look for
For the most critical information in transaction-intensive applications, IT managers have the option of replicating (mirroring) data to disaster recovery sites via high-speed network links. This can be expensive, however, not only for the storage infrastructure, but also the network (often 50% of ongoing costs).

Enterprises that take business continuity and data recovery seriously, should look for specific features in a service:

• fast, incremental backup over any IP connection;

• high-availability, user-initiated restores;

• surgical restores, configurablegroup policies for retention, protected data paths;

• ease of offsite vaulting, economical multiyear archiving;

• commonality factoring (stores one and only one copy of each chunk of data);

• content addressability (efficient, scalable and authenticated data store); and

• faster read and write speeds (to media).

Not every business is the same, and each comes with its own, unique requirements for business continuity and data protection. Bear in mind these key questions:

• Is your storage policy dictated by state or federal legislation?

• How does your business store and use data?

• What budget/resources do you have available?

• Must you manage the backup policy for a geographically dispersed infrastructure?

• Do you have power users who demand “always on” high performance or are your users less demanding, but require ease-of-use?

• What would it cost your business if confidential data was compromised? Lost? Unrecoverable?

• How often must your data be backed up to supply ample business continuity?

• How fast must data be restored to minimize company downtime?

For more information from Verio:
www.rsleads.com/510cn-261

Christopher Davis Sr. is product manager at Verio, Englewood, Colo.