8 Tips for Creating an Effective Data Recovery and Protection Plan

As enterprises update their information technology to handle the increasing volume and velocity of data from more and more sources, the eyes of IT are also on disaster recovery and data protection. While IT administrators know that digital transformation will stop if ever the data stops, most of them are too busy catching up with the day-to-day load of data protection to research, test and implement the tools that will actually put them on top of the wave instead of underneath it. In fact, there are several opportunities for data recovery that many IT professionals don’t always consider. eWEEK caught up with Adrian Moir, lead technology evangelist at Quest Software, to discuss best practices for managing data recovery in this age of data deluge.

When contemplating data recovery and protection solutions, the first step is to ask yourself what your company can (literally and figuratively) afford to lose. Questions to ask include: “How much have we budgeted for data loss this year?” “How much data can we afford to lose?” “How regularly do we want to protect it?” and “How long can we afford to be offline?”

Your IT teams have more business-critical initiatives to tackle than repetitive processes that bog down their time day in and day out. Automated deployment is the first opportunity for convenience; configuration should not require extensive time and expertise. Seek out a simple, wizard-driven GUI on a preconfigured appliance optimized at the factory.

Virtual environments continue to grow past the point of tracking by hand. Make sure that your solution automatically identifies and protects new virtual machines as they are created.

Data protection can play a large part in realizing the promise of cloud computing by providing the ability to not only protect but also quickly recover data from and to cloud-based environments. Bare-metal restore (BMR)—in which restore can be achieved without a previously installed operating system or software—enables multi-environment restore such as a physical machine to a virtual machine, a VM to a physical machine or VMware to Hyper-V hypervisor. BMR is highly flexible, allowing IT and sysadmins to preserve application uptime and data availability, even in the cloud.

Data protection on disk not only improves backup and recovery speeds but also helps ensure that data is always available for analysis or testing.

When backing up to disk, look for in-built deduplication and compression. Benefits include lower storage costs, improved backup and recovery performance, a cutback of network data volume and a significant reduction in the data storage footprint.

Today’s users demand uninterrupted application uptime and availability. A strong data protection strategy ensures that an organization can recover vital data in the shortest possible time and limit the impact on user experience after an unplanned outage or interruption.

Snapshots should be as frequent as every five minutes all day, every day, without incurring huge expenses or hampering performance. This will limit your window of potential data loss to a matter of minutes at worst.