September 22nd, 2008
It seems that in most organizations, disaster recovery is an afterthought. After all, it’s not important until, well, it’s important! You don’t think about a solid plan until you actually need to exercise such plan and all too often by the time that comes it’s too late. So why does it take so much effort to come up with a plan to protect your critical systems? What are the hurdles to implementing that plan and is it actually going to work?
There is a saying that “Your backup is only as good as your first successful recovery.” I think this saying holds true time and time again because if you have not exercised your backup and recovery plan then how do you know it is going to work? Most businesses today depend heavily on tape backup. This is probably a tried and true method but, it has it’s limitations and it is often not reliable. In no way should you depend solely on tapes unless you don’t mind losing a little data or being down for an extended period of time. Tapes are susceptible to data corruption and it is often time consuming to rotate tapes, bring them from an off-site location (if you use one), catalog, load, and restore information from them. As well as the cost of tapes.
I think the biggest shortfall of successful backup plans has to do with the IT Budget. If you are fortunate enough, you have a virtually unlimited budget and you can implement whatever plan your imagination can come up with! This is often not the case and most companies have to weigh the cost of expensive backup solutions against funding for other initiatives. Security is typically at the forefront because what good is data backup if users can’t utilize your information due to a security breach? The gamut of disaster recovery Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in General | No Comments »
