New data protection strategies

NNeww Dattaa Protectionn Strategieessby Norlynn Nelson & Russ Fellows June 20, 2008
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Copyright 2008 Evaluator Group, Inc. and IBM Inc. All rights reserved.


Executive Summary One of today's greatest challenges facing organizations is the protection of corporate data. The issues that complicate data protection are compounded by increasing demand for data capacity, and higher service levels. Often these demands are coupled with regulatory requirements and a shifting business environment impacting applications and infrastructure. IT organizations must meet these demands while maintaining flat budgets.
Protecting data requires a disaster recovery plan that meets business needs, but is able to operate efficiently in order to deliver a competitive advantage for the organization. One technology that can help improve data protection service levels, with minimal impact to operations cost-effectively is Continuous Data Protection (CDP).
IBM with TSM FastBack leverage CDP technology to deliver a set of data protection and recovery tools, which enable IT users to deliver cost effective disaster recovery solutions. The technologies are flexible, allowing businesses to customize solutions capable of delivering higher service and protection levels than were previously possible for each cost point; balancing cost, performance and data protection.

Copyright 2008, Evaluator Group, Inc. Page 1 of 11

The Delicate Balance Protecting a business' most valuable resource is the primary challenge facing today's information technology (IT) personnel. The most valuable corporate resource is information, which must be protected from a number of natural and man made disasters. The challenge to not only protect data, but to ensure that disasters may be weathered has many facets, including:
. An ever increasing amount of data . The importance of application availability, reliability and scalability based on changing business requirements . Finite backup windows . Progressively more stringent Restore Point Objectives (RPO) and Restore Time Objectives (RTO) . Fiduciary and other regulatory compliance issues . Remote and global geographically dispersed systems Government statistics show that over 90% of companies who lost access to their data center information for more than 10 days filed for bankruptcy within one year. The issues surrounding backup and data recovery affect all businesses, regardless of size. Whether it is a Fortune 100 company or a small to medium size business (SMB), if essential mission critical business data can not be restored in a timely manner, the impact to the company may be catastrophic.
Figure 1: Balancing Capacity, Performance and Cost
Meeting these challenges requires a delicate balance between goals, including financial considerations. Companies must weigh the necessary business requirements for application resiliency with an increasing demand for data storage, all while managing costs.
Any company seeking to minimize the risk of data loss or corruption must have a data protection framework that delivers on the most important aspect -data and application availability. An effective data protection plan will address natural disasters, which have a small probability for
Copyright 2008, Evaluator Group, Inc. Page 2 of 11

occurrence. A robust and comprehensive disaster recovery (DR) plan will take into consideration other highly probable situations, such as those caused by human error, or other scenarios that may delete or corrupt data. The focus of any DR and business continuity strategy should be the ability to restore data and restart critical applications, quickly and cost effectively, regardless of the cause.
With traditional solutions, there is a direct relatio... [download for more]