Gartner IV: Data Protection Means Data Recovery Planning

One of the major issues in data protection is proper data recovery planning, David Russell told an audience at the Gartner Business Continuity Management Summit in Chicago last week.

Collection firms and other companies that store information on computer systems will need to recover data when systems crash due to natural disasters, power outages or technology failures.

Russell, a vice president of research at Gartner, said that improving recovery continues to be a priority for most companies though remote offices tend to get much of the attention today because these offices don’t always back up data, due in part to little or no technical staff.

The amount of data these remote offices are producing is growing, Russell said. “IT organizations should ensure that there is an appropriate recovery process in place for remote and branch office data to guarantee that business recovery objectives and regulatory requirements are addressed.”

Though the majority of backups today are done with computer tape, Gartner predicts that by 2010 disk-based backup and recovery will be the primary means of recovering data. Mid-market companies will be the first to adopt a disk-only approach to reduce errors caused by manual input, according to Russell. Tape backup tends to require a higher level of human intervention, and, therefore, is more apt to result in problems.

Expect to see disks replace tape for a great deal of off-site vaulting in the future, as well, Russell said.

Though the cost of backup technology has dropped sharply, the amount of data that companies produce continues to grow. To keep backup costs low, Russell recommends that firms establish the need and value for recovery, then calculate the cost to the business.

Russell recommended archiving data whenever practical. This will mean there is less data to routinely back up and reduce the time needed to restore information from a backup if the need arises.

“Investigate new technologies for applicability in your data protection strategy,” Russell added, recommending a tiered data recovery system that prioritizes and restores the most important data first.