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Introduction
Risk is defined as the probability or chance of loss. Everyday, people think about their assets — health, job, property, finances, etc. — and what the potential is for any negative effect on those assets. Security conscious individuals mitigate risk with insurance or preventative measures.
Similarly, businesses today have to be responsive and resilient when it comes to risk. Identification and management of strategic and operational risks and compliance issues are important for safeguarding an organization. At the heart of the assets requiring protection from risk are the business-critical data and applications, as well as the infrastructure where the data and applications reside.
IT departments design the organization’s infrastructure with continuity of business operations in mind. However, most organizations aren’t doing enough to protect mission-critical data, applications and systems from unexpected disruption and potential loss -- volatilities, such as viruses, power outages, natural disasters, corruption, human error and media failures can’t always be prevented. Business environments today are characterized by rapid data growth, complexity, stringent business requirements and, oftentimes, government regulations, making it difficult for IT to get their arms around their data protection strategies. In many cases, the focus is on just protecting data — not necessarily on recovering it. And when there is a focus on recovery, it usually involves just making data available to an application.
Double-Take® Software is promoting a different approach — one that goes beyond recovery. Double-Take Software’s concept of “recoverability” involves layers of protection that not only mitigate the risk of data loss, but, importantly, maintain the health and uptime of systems and applications. Although the distinction is slight, the results are dramatic. By preparing for, preventing and minimizing the impact of a catastrophic event, such as a natural disaster, hardware failure, system corruption or operational error, IT organizations gain in productivity (spend significantly less time recovering from a negative event), customer satisfaction (through its ability to meet recovery objectives), recovery cost savings and more.
Why is Recovery Important?
Round-the-clock access to data and applications in today’s 24/7 world is simply expected. The criticality of data and application availability has placed tremendous demands on IT organizations. While infrastructure vulnerabilities are monitored and measures are put in place to thwart downtime events, not all disruption scenarios can be foreseen. IT must be concerned with its ability to maintain uptime of systems and, when it does experience a disruption, be able to recover the data it needs, when and where it needs it. If IT cannot meet those objectives, the business may risk financial losses, as well as operational setbacks, customer complaints and compliance consequences.
In fact, not meeting recovery objectives was shown to have a significant impact on organizations in recent ESG research. Restoring access after an interruption is defined by the recovery point objective (RPO) (how fully data can be restored) and recovery time objective (RTO) (how quickly data can be restored). Respondents cited application downtime (66%), dissatisfied end-users (45%), data loss (31%), dissatisfied customers (27%) and lost revenue (20%) as the top five issues resulting from missed RPOs and RTOs (Figure One).
To minimize recovery time, IT staffs strive to leverage automation and save time wherever possible — operational efficiency is tantamount to meeting these service level agreements. To minimize data loss, the frequency of data copies should be increased — something not typically accomplished with once-per-day backup processes. In fact, ESG found that 56% of enterprise end-users and 46% of mid-tier end-users cited that they didn’t know or were worried that some of their data was at risk (Figure Two).
As previously stated, as important as it is to protect data, it’s also critical to protect the infrastructure where the data resides — the server, its operating system and system configuration, as well as the applications. In the event of a failure, the time it takes to secure replacement hardware, re-install the operating system and applications and recover or manually re-set system settings is especially time-consuming. It may then take hours or days to actually recover data, depending on the backup media. The largely manual process will set productivity back and may adversely impact business operations.
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