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The Right Approach to Data Protection and Business Continuity

Eric J. Bruno
The challenge of protecting your business from the disruptive impact of a natural or other type of disaster is one of the most difficult and complicated challenges you face. As a result, you need to implement not just a solution, but also a tested and validated plan. Without expert guidance and the regular testing of procedures, these plans can become a budget-consuming albatross that provide your business zero effectiveness, value, and peace of mind.

An effective business continuity plan in terms of data and storage begins with modernization, which on its own brings additional benefits such as mobility, flexible access, and ease of management. For the greatest success, find tools and/or a partner that can meet the following critical needs:

Ease of Administration
An effective administrative solution improves efficiency so you can meet your goals with reduced overhead. It should enable you to manage additional storage needs without growing your current IT staff.

Shared and Secure Network-enabled Storage
Centralized, pooled sharing of storage resources eliminates silos and increases flexibility as well as efficiency. With it, you can better manage data center power and space capacity. Finally, make sure your solution supports disk snapshotting to better manage virtualized and cloud-based infrastructure.

Support A Heterogeneous Approach
Planning to support best-of-breed solutions allows you to get the best value across multi-vendor offerings. Include multi-protocol support, which allows a mix of environments to work together. This is especially important for enterprises developing applications across platforms (i.e. Mac/iOS, Android/UNIX, and Windows). This approach also helps you unify storage discovery and access, reducing the need for one-off solutions to further improve IT efficiency.

Policy and Automation
Create a policy-based storage strategy that includes a number of tested policies that meet the needs of various facets of your business. Next, automate the provisioning of storage based on these tested policies to ensure data protection, without wasting time and money reinventing the wheel.

Reporting and Compliance with Data Recovery
Generate statistics and reports at predefined intervals to know the state and health of your business data. This enables you to also meet auditing and compliance requirements, especially where regulations apply.

Data recovery goes beyond whole-disk restoration and includes individual files, transactions, database tables, and so on. Compliance also mandates the effective storage of email, databases, instant messaging, and other business and communication archives. Each of these has specific regulatory requirements that need to be met, especially in terms of legal timelines that carry potential fines or other penalties.

Conclusion
To make money and meet customer needs, your business systems need to be up and running all the time. Remember that a modernization strategy goes a long way towards enabling maximum efficiency, availability, and protection. Find a partner with the knowledge and the solution to give you peace of mind.