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	TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction A Promising Solution: Continuous Data Protection Conclusion

Data loss is an unpleasant fact of modern life. 99.9 percent of all businesses have experienced at least one costly incident of data loss; causes include operating system crashes, failed software installations or updates, user error, power outages, and hard-drive failure. These incidents can have such a damaging effect that they are sometimes called "digital disasters."

According to a report by Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu, more than 50 percent of businesses have suffered non-recoverable data loss at one time or another. Just how serious is the problem? The report goes on to say that one-third of all digital disasters will result in financial setback.

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• 46% said each hour of downtime would cost their companies up to $50k
• It takes 19 days and costs $17,000 to retype 20 megabytes of sales data
• The same volume of accounting data takes 21 days and costs $19,000
• Recreating data from scratch is estimated to cost between $2000 and $8000/MB
  
  Cost of Downtime Survey, 2001

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So what's a business to do?

Back It Up (It's the Law)!

Of course, businesses have a financial incentive to safeguard their electronic data. But now there's an even more compelling reason to do so--it's the law! Sarbanes Oxley Act (SOX) of 2002 requires business to retain certain kinds of information for specific durations. Lost data could put a business out of compliance with SOX and invite in possible legal action.

The most common types of business data that need to be protected include: financial information, business plans, employee data, classified or technical information under a non-disclosure agreement (NDA), product or service data and working documents, and communication documents (e-mails). Regardless of the type of data, the new rule of thumb is that documents need to be kept in a tamper-proof format for at least five years.

Taking all this into consideration, it is recommended that businesses develop a comprehensive data recovery plan to prevent unnecessary data loss in the event of a digital disaster.

Here's how...

Things to Consider When Building a Data Recovery Plan

Start out by identifying the necessary elements of a data recovery plan. Then evaluate the potential pitfalls of possible solutions for backing up critical business data.

The elements critical to building a good data recovery plan include:

• Defining the possible disaster scenarios and understanding the impact on downtime, the number of people affected, and how it could hinder your daily operations.
• Minimizing the effects of possible disasters through the selection and implementation of sound backup systems and procedures.
• Documenting this information in written form as your company's official "disaster recovery plan" and include who is responsible for recovery.
• Reviewing your backup strategy on a yearly basis to determine if preset responses to the possible scenarios you've charted above are still valid and updating them if not.

General categories of backup solutions include tape, digital media, hardware RAID, software solutions, and hosted services. All of these have advantages for being reliable components of a data recovery plan. But with each of these categories, there are known limitations that also cast doubt on the likelihood of successfully recovering all critical data following a crash scenario.

Potential problems a company can run into when trying to recover data include:

• Incomplete recovery due to missing data (if backup points were never tested for reliability to know there was a problem).
• Long recovery periods resulting in interrupted business operations.
• Partial recovery resulting from lack of real-time backups (in other words, businesses can only get back the data at their most recent backup, which hopefully wasn't last work week).

Another potential problem arises for companies that have a distributed workforce (mobile workers, telecommuters, branch offices, and the like). Measures should be taken to protect the corporate-owned knowledge on all laptops used in the field and all desktops used in home offices. Typically, business data recovery plans only focus on corporate networks, and this oversight will leave the remote worker particularly vulnerable when they experience data loss.

Now that you've considered the necessary elements and potential pitfalls of a data recovery plan, it's time to build a plan that's right for your business.

1 Introduction | 2 A Promising Solution: Continuous Data Protection | 3 Conclusion Next Page

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