IT Planner: 5 Steps to Continuous Data Protection (
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Despite a clear need, many companies wait until it is too late.
If there was ever an it initiative that seemed like a no-brainer, it would be continuous data protection—ensuring that all your company’s IT systems won’t lose any data in the event of a disaster. Still, many companies don’t have a CDP plan in place.
A 2007 Gartner study found that about 50 percent of surveyed organizations were at low levels of data recovery maturity: Stage 0 (no plan) or Stage 1 (a team in place to assess a plan).
Michael Osterman, of Osterman Research, told eWeek recently that business owners certainly understand the liabilities involved in not protecting data, but because data disasters are a potential problem, a CDP strategy often isn’t put into place until it’s too late.
“I just think that it sometimes takes headline shock to make people move on some things—especially when we’re talking about potential liabilities,” Osterman said. “In other words, if it hasn’t happened to them yet, it hasn’t happened. But once they read about a data loss case involving somebody else, they’re more likely to get something started.”
Before something happens to your company, consider planning for and installing some kind of CDP system. Here are five key steps to accomplishing this.
Step One: Plan around staff.
IT managers need to plan CDP strategies around staff and in accordance with company policies. Companies need to anticipate potential problems and have a well-documented, comprehensive plan to address both disaster recovery and continuity of essential business processes. And key to business continuity is your staff.
“The key driver in all of this is your people,” said Phil Dunkelberger, president and CEO of PGP, a security software provider. “They’re the ones who handle the data on a daily basis and the ones who will be using the CDP tools to maintain the data.”
Dunkelberger added that companies should be sure the CDP technology is designed to work with remote employees. Analysts have estimated that some large companies have as much—if not more—critical company data stored on corporate laptops as they do in their data centers. All these systems can and should be backed up and protected by a good CDP deployment.
