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Friday, May 04, 2007
Is disaster recovery testing putting your company at risk?
Is disaster recovery testing putting your company at risk?
Commentary--To quell the growing concerns over data theft, many companies have switched from physical tape backup to disk-based solutions and data vaulting whereby data is transmitted to a disaster recovery site over a public or private network.
While this alleviates the obvious worries over physical backup tapes, it presents some considerations for disaster recovery (DR) testing. In a peer-to-peer implementation when businesses are conducting their DR testing, some businesses tend to break the data replication process—putting them at risk for lengthy data recovery delays and the possibility of non-compliance with regulatory guidelines. Using appropriate techniques with an electronic data vaulting implementation, replication can continue uninterrupted during DR testing and eliminate any exposure of your production site and DR site being out of synch.
And it appears that compliance legislation will remain a serious issue for companies for the foreseeable future. Regulations such as Sarbanes-Oxley, Government Securities Act Regulation 17, FDA 21 CFR Part 11 and HIPAA, increase compliance exposure for companies, and demand more aggressive measures to lower risk. In the case of a legal discovery, where companies may be required to submit company data as evidence, it is imperative that this information be factual, up-to-date, and compliant. If data is unavailable for several hours or days during DR testing, then companies will not be able to produce the requested information in the time required and may put your company at further risk for non compliance.
Why physical tape storage is no longer a practical solution Businesses today are realizing the perils of merely storing data tapes offsite as part of their disaster recovery plan. There are simply too many opportunities for tapes to become lost, damaged, or stolen in transit or at the offsite destination. In addition, data recovery from tape is far too slow. Typically, records storage vendors guarantee they will be able to retrieve a tape within 24 hours of having picked it up at the customer site. And that doesn't include data restoration time. If a disaster occurs, IT managers must spend several days locating disparate data sets across tape volumes and restoring tapes in the proper sequential order. This is an extremely laborious process that typically exceeds time-to-recovery compliance requirements. To avoid these problems, many companies have moved to peer-to-peer data vaulting for their replication and DR needs.
The advantages and best practices for peer-to-peer data vaultingIn peer-to-peer data vaulting, data is replicated to a remote disk sub-system via a standard open-system communication link.
This means information from a company's main site is scheduled to automatically replicate data to an off-site location, whether that is daily or scheduled as needed. Co-locating company data at two separate sites allows for businesses to eliminate the need for tape, and restoring company data is much faster and cuts down the restore window from days to hours. However, peer-to-peer replication can present some issues. For example, when a business initiates its disaster recovery testing, if it breaks the replication link between the two sites, it effectively takes the remote replication process off-line completely. This link is broken for the length of the DR test which can be days, and once re-established can take some time to get data back in synch while the backup site catches up with the primary site. This leaves businesses vulnerable if a disaster occurs during that time or a compliance event takes place that requires immediate access to company data.
To view entire article: click here (Related) click here
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Source: ZDNet (Related) ZDNet
By: Jim O'Connor
While this alleviates the obvious worries over physical backup tapes, it presents some considerations for disaster recovery (DR) testing. In a peer-to-peer implementation when businesses are conducting their DR testing, some businesses tend to break the data replication process—putting them at risk for lengthy data recovery delays and the possibility of non-compliance with regulatory guidelines. Using appropriate techniques with an electronic data vaulting implementation, replication can continue uninterrupted during DR testing and eliminate any exposure of your production site and DR site being out of synch.
And it appears that compliance legislation will remain a serious issue for companies for the foreseeable future. Regulations such as Sarbanes-Oxley, Government Securities Act Regulation 17, FDA 21 CFR Part 11 and HIPAA, increase compliance exposure for companies, and demand more aggressive measures to lower risk. In the case of a legal discovery, where companies may be required to submit company data as evidence, it is imperative that this information be factual, up-to-date, and compliant. If data is unavailable for several hours or days during DR testing, then companies will not be able to produce the requested information in the time required and may put your company at further risk for non compliance.
Why physical tape storage is no longer a practical solution Businesses today are realizing the perils of merely storing data tapes offsite as part of their disaster recovery plan. There are simply too many opportunities for tapes to become lost, damaged, or stolen in transit or at the offsite destination. In addition, data recovery from tape is far too slow. Typically, records storage vendors guarantee they will be able to retrieve a tape within 24 hours of having picked it up at the customer site. And that doesn't include data restoration time. If a disaster occurs, IT managers must spend several days locating disparate data sets across tape volumes and restoring tapes in the proper sequential order. This is an extremely laborious process that typically exceeds time-to-recovery compliance requirements. To avoid these problems, many companies have moved to peer-to-peer data vaulting for their replication and DR needs.
The advantages and best practices for peer-to-peer data vaultingIn peer-to-peer data vaulting, data is replicated to a remote disk sub-system via a standard open-system communication link.
This means information from a company's main site is scheduled to automatically replicate data to an off-site location, whether that is daily or scheduled as needed. Co-locating company data at two separate sites allows for businesses to eliminate the need for tape, and restoring company data is much faster and cuts down the restore window from days to hours. However, peer-to-peer replication can present some issues. For example, when a business initiates its disaster recovery testing, if it breaks the replication link between the two sites, it effectively takes the remote replication process off-line completely. This link is broken for the length of the DR test which can be days, and once re-established can take some time to get data back in synch while the backup site catches up with the primary site. This leaves businesses vulnerable if a disaster occurs during that time or a compliance event takes place that requires immediate access to company data.
To view entire article: click here (Related) click here
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Source: ZDNet (Related) ZDNet
By: Jim O'Connor
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