How Well is Your Data Protected?

Do you sleep well at night knowing that an errant push of a button, or a rogue developer script could remove data that is critical to servicing your customers or your business? Are you prepared to recover your operational data quickly in the event it is gone? Do you think you’re covered because you have an High Availability (HA) solution for your servers and are replicating your live data real time to another data center? All these and more are good questions to ask yourself when evaluating this: “how well is your data protected?”.

Sadly, not knowing the answers to these questions or not understanding how your data is protected can leave you in a world of hurt in the event that critical data is corrupted or accidentally removed from your systems. Just the other day, a customer reported that an errant QA script decimated all of their server data resulting in a massive multi-terabyte restore exercise. Their business was down for hours while the recovery efforts were underway.

Now, let’s consider how to backup and recover your data. Should be easy, right? Just back it up. Oh wait, how often? And how long should you keep your data available in case you need it recovered? How quickly do you need it back? Can you wait for data to come back from offsite, or will data corruption and interruption in service impact your customers and your revenue stream? Can your business sustain an outage if data is removed? How much of an outage can you sustain until it starts to cost thousands, if not millions of dollars in lost revenue or customer SLA’s?

These are all great questions to be answered when setting up policies to protect your data, and each answer may or may not impact your cost to protect your data. By standardizing your backup practices and identifying high risk systems for a multi-layered approach to protection, you absolutely will be able to sleep at night knowing that continuity plans are in place for your business.

Are you protected? Sleep well!