Government Technology

Faced with unrelenting data growth in accounting, document management and e-mail, today’s IT administrators find themselves increasingly pressured to ensure the availability and security of their digital assets and to be able to recover quickly from anything from a simple drive failure to more catastrophic data loss.
    
But imagine how difficult it is for firms to do this without formal IT staff – just one person who sets up PCs and swaps out backup tapes while trying to keep up with regular job duties?
    
Strapped for IT resources, these firms often don’t set up procedures on how to secure and cost effectively manage their data backup and recovery processes. Rather, they’re hampered by such technical limitations as being unable to take advantage of incremental backups that shorten backup windows and enable less data to be stored on spinning disk or tape. Instead they are forced to rely on manual transport of backup tapes instead of leveraging their existing network infrastructure where data can be electronically sent to a secure, offsite data centre.
    
In this article EVault examines what firms need to do to maintain business continuity, through good corporate policy and supporting technology.

Corporate Policy
When it comes to corporate policy, firms should identify, prioritise and protect the company’s most important current applications, and forecast which ones will be needed in the future.
    
As their data grows and resources remain static, firms should design a plan that simplifies and automates IT functions. Policy-based automation not only maximises resources, it limits human errors that, according to the Gartner Group research firm, account for about 40 per cent of failures.
    
Organisations should also look to centralise their backup management. By having common practices across offices ensures operational efficiencies related to capital outlay and manpower resources.
    
Furthermore, firms should aim not to recreate backup policies every year for new areas or growing areas. Rather, standardise policies and make them pliable enough to work as the firm and its digital assets grow.

Other Considerations
Other considerations that should be looked at are how much downtime can the firms tolerate before it significantly impacts their business?

• Offsite Storage: If your region has a propensity for natural disaster, does it make sense to get data quickly offsite to a secure data centre facility out of the area?
• Data Recovery: What are the procedures for getting the digital assets from storage? Who will do this? Identifying and prioritising business-critical applications will make it easier to decipher what data to restore first.
• Security: Does the backup software have a self-encrypting process? Are firewall appliances being used? Consider the owner and location(s) of encryption key(s).
• Vendor Evaluation: Look to professionals with a proven track record of helping other firms. Talk to others within your local area. Be cautious of organisations who simply want to throw more equipment and money at the problem.
  

Technology
Although following the above tips and having a good corporate policy in place will help you, it is only half the battle when it comes to successful data protection, the other half is having the right solution. According to Gartner, 71 per cent of all tape-based restores fail. What you need is true online backup using disk-to-disk technology. Online data backup assures successful recoveries, with far greater speed and control than tapes. EVault's complete data protection solutions keep your business-critical information safe throughout the data lifecycle.

Furthermore, EVault’s solutions help organisations reduce the overall cost of backup and recovery. Operational efficiency increases because employees needn’t wait to restore data the way they do with tapes. Eliminating tapes also means no more lost data. A high proportion of tapes suffer data loss; that is not an issue with disk-to-disk backup.              

Organisations benefit as well from dramatically simpler regulatory compliance. EVault’s solutions – including end-to-end encryption – satisfy privacy and security requirements with ease. Disaster recovery is automated by virtue of storing backups offsite at secure data centres.  

Customers also enjoy smaller data footprints due to EVault’s DeltaPro™ and patented Adaptive Compression technologies, which capture only new and changed files and minimise their storage sizes on disk. Further efficiencies result from automatic data deduplication, bandwidth throttling, and more.
    
Finally, and most importantly, EVault saves you money. Its disk-to-disk back-up eliminates the need for tapes, which in turn eliminates the need to manage the tape environment, fix tape drives, replace tapes, store tapes, transport them, and purchase them.
    
However, the true savings don’t lie in the costs associated with the actual tapes but in the time employees save by using disk-to-disk based backup, and the increased productivity that results. Disk-based backup and recovery makes it easy to manage and monitor data protection across numerous servers, central databases, and system configurations from a central location. Thus it eliminates the need for IT staff at each office or site location, and minimises staff requirements.  

For more information
Tel: +44 (0) 845 258 5500
Web: www.evault.com/uk