Disaster Recovery (DR) planning is a major concern for any enterprise. There's always a chance that your business data could be lost due to corrupted software, a hardware failure, human error, or even an actual natural disaster like a hurricane or a flood taking out a data center. So how do you plan to recover? Our storage experts at Nasuni have just released a list of the top five factors any enterprise should evaluate when choosing a strategy - downtime, data integrity, cost, simplicity, and security. We thought we'd sum up the analysis briefly here.
Downtime
Speed is critical: A study by Contingency Planning Research estimated the cost of downtime at roughly $18,000/hour for many businesses. Recovering data from tapes can take days. Pulling it back from on-site disk storage cuts this to a matter of hours, but if your actual place of business is damaged, you might not be able to recover it at all.
Data Integrity
Lost data can mean lost revenue, but traditional data restores are often less than 100 percent successful. Tape is notoriously unreliable. Data mirroring offers redundancy, but if a disaster occurs, all data since the last backup will be lost.
Cost
Downtime can be costly, but losing data is also expensive: The Cost of Lost Data, a report by a Pepperdine University researcher, estimates that a single lost megabyte can cost upwards of $10,000. Tapes are relatively inexpensive, but too fragile to be relied upon, and backing up to disk leads to spiraling costs as your storage grows and grows over time.
Simplicity
If disaster strikes, you don’t want to be figuring out complex systems or diving through administrative hoops. Both backup and DR should be simple.
Security
Backup needs to be protected effectively, just like primary storage. Tapes are often very well-protected on site, but they can be lost or damaged in transit. Assuming strong internal security mechanisms, data backed up to disk is secure, but still vulnerable to human error or smart, malicious attackers.
Consider a Cloud Storage Gateway
The new generation of cloud storage gateways dramatically simplifies disaster recovery. The use of advanced caching algorithms allows data recovery from the cloud to be virtually instantaneous: if a critical server is lost, a quick download of the gateway, typically packaged as a virtual machine, can reestablish the connection to the cloud so that all of the data is available.
Cloud storage overcomes the flaws of tapes and disks by creating multiple copies of business data and storing them on numerous servers. Should one of these fail, the data is safely stored in several others - often in different geographic locations.
Disaster recovery via a cloud storage gateway also offers huge cost benefits. The price of recovery is effectively the price of storing your data in the cloud in the first place, which is far less expensive that traditional storage. Furthermore, if you choose a cloud storage gateway that takes advantage of data compression and deduplication, your savings increase even more.
Cloud storage gateways make the recovery process much simpler. It can be as easy as logging back into your cloud account and following the steps. In terms of security, cloud storage does have vulnerabilities, but if all data is encrypted at your site, before it is sent to the cloud storage provider, and other common-sense steps are taken, these risks are essentially eliminated.
Look for more insight on disaster recovery and the cloud in the coming weeks.