News and Features
Managing the Data Deluge, Part 4
Protect against disasters — and e-discovery bills
By Pam George
Secure data storage is part of a company’s solid backup and recovery plan. Yet it is also part of a good data management system. No matter whether you’re in the financial services sector, the healthcare arena or the technology industry, you may need to provide a document at a moment’s notice — regardless of when it was created.
“There are two reasons why you do backup,” says Tom Dugan, Owner and Founder of Philadelphia-based Recovery Networks, an offsite backup and recovery provider. “One is to recover — someone deleted a file, there’s a corrupted file or a building blew up. You want the last good copy. The other is for archival reasons. ÔI need to get this file from 2002, or I need to search these emails to find out if this person said these horrible things about our product.’”
An effective plan both backs up the data and archives critical information. But it is important to know the difference between the two and to have policies for each.
The Ever-Evolving World of Backup
Backup policies traditionally follow an approach nicknamed grandfather-father-son (or sons), because the data is backed up at aging intervals.
The IT department might perform a full backup on weekends. That full backup, the “father,” is shelved for one month. Daily backups, which record incremental changes since the last full backup, are the sons.
At the end of a month, a full backup is shelved for one year. This is the grandfather. Some companies also do yearly backups, kept for a length of time determined by company policies.
This generational strategy has typically involved tapes — and in many cases, it still does. Some companies, however, have switched to disks, which like tapes, must be stored and are often taken offsite to protect the data.
Online backup is another option. IPR International’s customers decide which information to back up and when the backup should occur. Information flows through an outbound-only port in the firewall. IPR, which is based in Conshohocken, Pa., compresses the data, and if requested, encrypts it. It’s then stored in IPR’s primary data center and backed up to a secondary location at least 80 miles away.
Recovery Networks offers a disk-based backup service with an onsite and offsite component. Customers plug the appliance into the network, which backs up the selected data onsite. It also sends the data to an offsite location.
“If your building blows up, we can restore all your data — your entire network — at our facility and get it up and running,” Dugan says.
Such services buck the standard aging approach, since you can back up every second if you choose. But because you might be replicating a corrupt file — or you may inadvertently delete a file before the next scheduled backup — it’s important to also record backups at specified intervals and save them instead of overwriting data each time.
A Combination Thereof
Which backup technology is for you? As data keeps accumulating and the need to store it becomes more imperative, you may need more than one.
“Keep most relevant reporting and relevant data with high-speed storage technology and have a low-performance storage solution for older information,” says Tom Connolly, President of BizTech, an IT services provider in King of Prussia, Pa., that helps customers leverage data warehousing technology.
Must-have, critical information, for instance, can go the high-tech route, such as a Storage Area Network (SAN) or online backup. “That’s the first line of defense,” Connolly says. “This is information that you need in minutes or a few days.”
Older information — such as 15 years of annual repots — can go on more inexpensive options, such as tape. “It’s still available and accessible, but it takes advantage of the lower storage costs,” Connolly says.
Some criticize tape for its limited space, but it is keeping up with the times. “The generation of tape we’re working with now is in the terabytes,” says Marvin Parker, General Manager of DocuSafe in Princeton, N.J. “You can put a great deal of information on a single tape.”
Classify to Quantify the Cost
When a computer system crashes, IT experts won’t demand the archived data right away. And unless the company is Amazon.com, the website may not be in the mission-critical category. But most companies will want email restored immediately.
Classifying the data’s importance helps determine how fast it should be restored. Often this is less about the data and more about the service the data enables, Dugan says.
Why not get all the data restored post haste? Picture the air-conditioner that shuts down on a Sunday. If you can wait two or three days to get it fixed, you’ll spend less on technician fees. And you wouldn’t call for emergency help if a ceiling fan sputters.
Classifying the data also helps when it comes to choosing a medium. If you don’t need it immediately and price is a consideration, you can select a less-expensive medium.
Archiving vs. Backing Up
Given today’s litigious society, regulations and compliance issues, companies are reluctant to delete, well, anything.
“We’re all packrats when it comes to the computer,” Dugan agrees. Unless forced, few employees scroll through thousands of emails to determine what to trash and what to keep.
But every time you do full backups, you are backing up all that old data — employee cheesecake recipes, files on ex-employees, financial reports from 2006 and umpteen working versions of a contract. Out of three terabytes of data, one terabyte might hold data that hasn’t been touched for five years. Another terabyte might contain data that hasn’t been viewed for a year.
“Yet you’re paying me to store those two terabytes,” Dugan notes. Recovery Networks offers an archiving service that stores old data by size or date and moves it offsite, leaving a shortcut-like entry on the system to access it. As a result, only the remaining terabyte of newer information is backed up regularly.
Finding, Keeping and Retiring
The challenge with archiving information is keeping track of it, says Fred Diers, Vice President of the Governance, Risk and Compliance Practice for Judge Consulting Group in Conshohocken, Pa. “You need processes and procedures to ensure that as time goes on, someone out there is aware of it and can migrate it to new media. That’s where programs fall apart; companies forget it’s out there.”
Consider the company that paid a forensic services firm $8 million to read backup information, he says. The data, acquired through the acquisition of another firm, was so old that the company no longer had the technology to access it.
A record retention policy will determine how long to keep the archived information. But the policy must be consistent and sustainable, Diers says. The type of business, the risk factors and the regulations also affect the retirement plan.
It’s a good plan in theory. But fearful that one day the information might be needed, many companies will continue to simply stash it indefinitely. And with so many storage options, there’s no real drive to delete, Connolly acknowledges.
Dugan points to today’s storage media, which like computers themselves or mobile phones, hold more and take up less space. “In the future, storage capacity will get cheaper and skinnier and smaller and faster,” Dugan says.
And the data deluge, no doubt, will continue.
Photo-Illustration by Renée Guie
/ Hollister Creative
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