DR/BC and Data Protection Move Closer

The worlds of disaster recovery/business continuity and data protection conceptually are two sides of the same coin. Keeping information safe and secure go hand-in-hand with making sure that this data can be recovered and put to its proper use in a timely manner after an emergency.

 

This InformationWeek story on Acronis’ version 11 — and, of course, the product itself — makes the assumption that the conceptual link is growing stronger. Data repositories, in the cases of both DR/BC and data protection, are increasingly decentralized. The story quotes Izzy Azeri, Acronis’ senior vice president and general manager for the Americas, as pointing out that the amount of data is exploding and the places it is being stored are proliferating. It is stored on premise, at hosting companies and in the cloud.

 

The explosion of data and the run of emergency situations around the world should lead to more attention being paid to how DR/BC is implemented. The events of the past decade show the importance of disaster recovery planning (DRP), the topic discussed by Richard Dolewski, CTO and vice president of business continuity services for WTS, in this Data Center Knowledge piece. His column goes into significant and very good detail on the need for testing, and points out that there is more than one approach. Among many other things, he describes active and passive DRP test techniques.

 

Much of this isn’t new. It should be noted, however, that it is growing more important. Just during the past couple of months there have been a devastating earthquake, a tsunami and a nuclear disaster in Japan and horrific tornados and record flooding in the United States. It may simply be a matter of perception, but it seems that the emergencies are occurring more often than ever and are more serious when they do happen. In any case, a look at the evening news should squelch any notion that DR/BC isn’t a vital, mission-critical operation. Data protection also is vital, though even IT personnel aren’t taking it as seriously as they should.

 

The bad news — surrounding the explosion of data that must be protected — has a bit of a silver lining: The very explosion can tighten the knot with data protection. The smart companies recognize that simply saving gazillions of gigabytes of data backed up doesn’t do much good if it isn’t ordered so that IT departments struggling to get back online after an emergency can make heads or tails out of it. The need to identify and prioritize what is what and where it is stored also are vital elements of data protection. Thus, more than ever, data protection and DC/BC are reading from the same script.