Viruses, hackers and phishers all draw high levels of publicity, but the biggest hazard most organisations face lies in their inability to recover their lost data.
Today only two types of IT users exist: those that have lost data and those that will lose data. So everyone needs a security policy in place that includes recovery of data and systems.
Most firms, but surprisingly not all of them, have backup solutions in place, and the hassle to restore can be quite painful. If tape is used, backups are rarely tested for integrity of recoverability. This presents a whole new series of challenges to businesses. In the event of a disaster, all businesses should consider: Can we restore from our current backup product? How long would it take? How much data will we lose?
Managers should develop their security strategies knowing they have the ability to recover not only their data, but also their operating systems and databases, in the event of a serious malware attack.
A transition is well under way, migrating from tape to disk to next generation real-time recovery (RTR) solutions that deliver disk-to-disk to offsite archival. RTR represents an organisation’s last line of defence after an attack, as the technology is capable of restoring data and systems from a previous 15-minute point in time in as little as 3-5 minutes, reducing time to return to business in minutes and minimising data loss. Total recovery can be fast, easy, reliable, affordable and non-intrusive.
An organisation should consider the following key issues: the recovery time objective (RTO) – time taken to rebuild a system and get it back into operation; the recovery point objective (RPO) – how far back in time they go to restore a ‘clean’ data set; and the affordability and complexity of the solution. For best practice, the faster the RTO, the less RPO, the more affordable and less complex the better the solution.
Historically recovery or business continuity solutions have been available only to large organisations with extensive IT resources. Now RTR solutions are affordable by even small companies, as well as being reliable and easy to use. Disaster recovery has often been considered a business expense and ‘nice to have’ although hard to justify and difficult to manage.
New RTR technology costs around NZ$1300 per physical server or NZ$2500 for 12 virtual servers, enabling companies of all sizes to deploy a cost effective solution for business continuity as a complete backup, recovery, disaster recovery.
It’s like an insurance policy - only important when it is needed (after a major corruption, virus or hardware failure) and for those who don’t have it, the end result can be devastating. But with RTR technology as a last line of defence after a malware or hacker attack, the ability to restore data and systems from a previous ‘clean’ 15-minute point in time, reducing time to return to work in minutes and minimising data loss, the ‘insurance’ becomes an affordable must-have.
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