|
Most enterprises are faced with the challenge of information explosion today. Even small to medium-size businesses (SMB) have begun to acquire terabytes of data. Management of storage systems, and the data held within them, is a cause of great concern within IT departments and corporate legal offices. With the advent of new regulations and the understanding of how incredibly valuable corporate data is, there is a new focus on protecting and accessing data.
Data protection strives to minimize business losses due to the lack of verifiable data integrity and availability and is critical to the enterprise in the long run. The single-most important reason to implement data protection strategies is financial loss. Data is recognized as an important corporate asset that needs to be safeguarded all the time. Apart from financial losses, data loss can also cause indirect losses from the effects of a drop in investor confidence or customers fleeing to competitors. Another important business driver is the recent spate of regulations. Governments throughout the world have begun imposing new regulations on electronic communications and stored data. Businesses face dire consequences for non-compliance. A third driver is loss in productivity. The inability of a business to operate because of a data loss, even a temporary one, is driving many businesses to deploy extensive data protection schemes today.
Business risks of data loss
Companies recognize that data loss represents a business risk. Three types of damage may occur because of data loss. First, data may be unrecoverable. Next, data may be recoverable but may require considerable time to restore. This scenario—the most likely—assumes that data is backed up in some other place, separate from the primary source. In some cases, not all the data may be recovered. This is a common problem with data restored from nightly backups. Finally, while data is unavailable, either permanently or temporarily, applications not directly related to lost data may fail. This is especially true of relational databases that reference other databases.
A corporation might lose important data due to disasters---both natural and man-made, security breaches, accidents or unintended user action and system failure. Business continuity is the ability of a business to continue to operate in the face of disaster and is of utmost importance to all enterprises across sectors. Protecting data and the access to it is a primary component of business continuity strategies. Restoring systems whose data has been destroyed is useless. IT needs to ensure that the data entrusted to it survives.
|