Janco has identified four primary business drivers of data protection:

• Provide Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery. This is the traditional concern of mitigating exposure to information loss. However it has grown more complicated as 24/7, global economy, and open source have become standard business issues. Of paramount importance is overcoming the hurdles associated with backup window requirements, application performance, reliability and consistency, and recovery time.
• Streamline Process Management and Increase Productivity. As staff and resources become overburdened, companies are refocusing on process management. Easing critical pressure points is often the catalyst to surviving a difficult fiscal climate.
• Contain Storage and Server Costs. Controlling cost of operations has become a top priority for many organizations. With data growing at exponential rates, these costs can easily mushroom.
• Support IT Infrastructure Consolidation. Today's data protection architecture seems to be intrinsically broken - as characterized by slow backups, complex recoveries, compromised application performance, and difficult resource administration. IT infrastructure consolidation including server virtualization magnifies the problems and elevates the rearchitecture of storage and data protection as a priority. Finding high performing, easy-to-use, scalable data protection remains a key imperative. Further, system migration of production servers and critical applications to a virtual environment are likely to be costly and painful unless an easy and minimum-impact solution to migration is built into the rearchitecture.

Certain areas of the United States have also had power supply problems in the recent past. Most notable is California with its infamous rolling blackouts. Parts of Texas also implemented rolling blackouts when there are abnormally high temperatures. Other regions of the country implement brownouts, where the voltage is reduced to customers during power emergencies. Brownouts can severely affect electronic equipment not protected with an UPS or voltage regulation device. A CIO whose data center was located in the region of California affected by the power crises said: You have to restore and operate your systems from an alternate location that has power. Obviously, that site is usually pretty far away and it is not practical to physically move systems. Moving an interconnected web of storage and servers to another set of infrastructure is a huge challenge. These things just were not designed for that kind of mobility and that is exactly the problem that virtualization solves.

• Repeated full backups
• Repeated incrementals of the same file when it changes multiple times.

A deduplication system identifies both situations and eliminates redundant files, reducing the amount of disk necessary to store your backups anywhere from 10:1 to 50:1 and beyond,
depending on the level of redundancy in your data. Deduplication systems also work their magic at the subfile level. To do so, they identify segments of data (a segment is typically smaller than a file but bigger than one byte) that are redundant with other segments and eliminate them. The most obvious use for this technology is to allow users to switch from disk staging strategies (where theyÂ’re storing only one nightÂ’s worth of backups) to disk backup strategies (where theyÂ’re storing all onsite backups on disk).

There are two main types of deduplication. Target dedupe systems allow customers to send traditional backups to a storage system that will then dedupe them; they are typically used in medium to large datacenters and perform at high speed. Source dedupe systems use different backup software to eliminate the redundant data from the very beginning of the process and serve to back up remote offices and mobile users.

As business technology proliferated over the past 10 to 15 years, DRP / BCP coverage expanded from back office systems to all types of additional business applications.

New business applications and IT services help organizations react quickly to a dynamic marketplace and provide access to information -  wherever and whenever it's needed. Areas of concern include:

• Companies are reducing the overall number of data centers, consolidating remote and branch office assets in the process.
• E-mail, instant messaging, IP telephony, and collaboration applications have become integral parts of many companiesÂ’ business processes.
• Given the volume of users accessing information, securing the environment is crucial. Allowing unauthorized users to access classified information or failing to protect data in flight could result in significant security breaches.

Long-term data retention includes weekly, monthly or other long-term backup, primary backup copy of data, off-line copy of static or fixed content data, archive and strategic data preservation. The emphasis is on low cost, long-term durability, compatibility, and energy efficiency for lengthy data retention. Tape is leveraged as a high performance bulk storage medium to off-load the disk cache, boosting the effectiveness and utilization of disk-based systems. From a green and economic efficiency standpoint, data staged off-line to tape consumes no energy while enabling exceptional performance during bulk restore operations. The combination results in both very green and economically efficient storage in addition to supporting business sustainability and enabling compliance.

A tape copy operation may be made locally and then physically transported to another location for safe off-site storage, or data may be replicated as part of the backup and data protection process to a remote VTL or tape library where a removable tape copy is made. Hybrid solutions also leverage diskto- disk locally with snapshots or other point-intime copies that are then replicated to another location or to a cloud-based storage managed service provider (MSP). Data and network bandwidth optimization techniques and technologies, including compression and deduplication among others, enable more data to be moved on available networks or to reduce networking requirements.

Server enclosures provide access control options such as lock-and-key, electronic control, RFID local readers and access cards.  

• Keys can be matched to individual cabinets, multiple cabinets of a certain type (such as containing networking equipment, telephone company equipment or servers), or any other combination desired.
• Electronic control can provide multiple types of access, such as remote control, timed control, card reader control or a combination of all of these methods.
• Diversified access-control strategies enable you to manage access at the level of function and/or individual, while a top-level disaster recovery administrator has a master key.

1.       Focus on operations

2.       Train everyone on how to execute the DRP and BCP

3.       Have a clear definition for declaring when a disaster or business interruption occurs that will set the DRP and BCP process into motion -

4.       Integrate DRP and BCP with change management

5.       Focus on addressing issues BEFORE they impact the enterprise

6.       Validate that all technology is properly installed and configured right from the start

7.       Monitor the processes and people to know what critical

.

Many disaster recovery plans cannot keep up with the speed of doing business in today's world. A 24-hour recovery time from a disaster is enough to put many companies out of business.

Many business executives feel their disaster recovery strategy is woefully inadequate and that their disaster recovery plans are out-of-date and provide for minimal coverage. This coverage includes having their legacy applications run on their mainframe or proprietary systems. Very few disaster recovery plans go much deeper into the application suite.  In interviews with business executives Janco estimates their coverage to be about 10% of their critical applications. According to the some estimates, 75% of all critical applications operate 24/7. That is precisely why corporations are moving away from disaster recovery to replicated data and processing. However, this falls short as well. Instead, what is needed is an architectural approach to the problem.

The Janco Disaster Recovery - Business Continuity Template directly address these issues.

Disaster planning is complex; the written plan is the result of a wide range of preliminary activities. The entire process is most efficient if it is formally assigned to one person who acts as the disaster planner for the institution and is perhaps assisted by a planning team or committee. The enterprise's director may play this primary role or may delegate the responsibility, but it is important to remember that the process must be supported at the highest level of the organization if it is to be effective. The planner should establish a timetable for the project and should define the scope and goals of the plan, which will depend largely on the risks faced by the enterprise.

A disaster recovery is a response to a declared disaster or a regional disaster. It is the restoration or recovery of an entire Agent computer. A disaster recovery plan describes how an organization is to deal with potential disasters.

Just as a disaster is an event that makes the continuation of normal functions impossible, a disaster recovery plan consists of the precautions taken so that the effects of a disaster will be minimized, and the organization will be able to either maintain or quickly resume mission-critical functions.