Future Proofing Data Protection
July 18, 2016 by Lore Marketing Team
Data protection strategies have evolved over the last several years. As organizations’ needs have changed, data protection methods have evolved from simple backups on disks to much more complex strategies. As business owners think about data protection, many want to protect their business’s data now and well into the future.
Take a minute to think about the changes data protection strategies have experienced over the last decade. In 2005, the focus was on clustering data, load balancing, and raid systems. Virtualization had just started gaining traction, and much of what is available for protecting data today had not yet been invented. Looking ahead to the next ten years, it is easy to see that data protection strategies will be incredibly different in that they will rely heavily on virtualization and the cloud. However, most business owners protecting data on local servers will not find this method to be effective, as hackers have learned how to easily tap into these servers.
As technology advances, more complex forms of data protection strategies are needed. Business owners need to alter their strategies as technology evolves, and the way to do this is to future-proof data using the following three actions:
1. Adopt Resilient Thinking
Resiliency means recovering from data loss quickly. As business owners develop data protection strategies, recovery should be the focus, rather than just prevention. Backing up data is essential to effective data protection, but what happens when data is lost? Understanding how to recover from the loss by using the backup method is critical to the continued operations of a business.
However, focusing only on recovery is not the solution either. Business owners need to think of data protection in three parts– prevention, recovery, and re-implementation. Prevention includes backup with encryption, recovery methods dictate how to gather and input data back into the systems, and reimplementation involves taking what occurred (hacker attack, natural disaster, etc.) and figure out how to keep it from happening again.
Understanding how to bounce back from data breaches can be just as important as knowing how to prevent them from happening.
2. Determine Data Protection Needs
Resilience is not easily achieved for organizations. It takes time and solid planning to come up with the steps needed to recover data and implement new data protection strategies. To help make resiliency easier to achieve, determine your business’s data protection needs.
Start with understanding what needs to be protected. Many businesses must protect against data loss, system crashes, application failures, and cyber threats. It is important to identify the threats to data on the local level, as well as network level, to encompass all possibilities when developing a data protection strategy.
Next, assess the current data protection strategy. Backup and recovery should be the priority. Analyzing the details of how to recover data loss from multiple servers may mean developing a plan of how to better store the data, so recovery is not as cumbersome. Recovery time is an important consideration with data protection because business operations rely on data, and long recovery times may result in lost business.
Identify possible failures in data backup and recovery to improve data protection strategies for the future.
3. Embrace the Cloud
The cloud offers a multitude of benefits for storage, computing, and networking. The cloud offers instant backup with immediate recovery in case of data loss. The elasticity of the cloud has rescued organizations countless times, whether employees of the organization are working on a single server or a large network of servers. Businesses of the future will turn to the cloud to fill in the gaps of their data protection strategies not because of the magnitude of storage space available for data, but because of its resiliency. Future proofing data protection is not about the technological advances of the future, but about the resiliency businesses have when dealing with data loss.
Virtualization, such as a virtual computing network, may already be part of most organizations, but not part of their data protection strategies. Implementing virtualization into data protection can be a complex process for medium to large sized businesses. With IT departments already overwhelmed with keeping computers updated and running smoothly, it may be wise to hire a dedicated IT professional to implement data protection strategies for your business.
contact us today for more information on how we can help your business future-proof its data with the power and resiliency of the cloud.