In a time where digital media has become a necessity in successful businesses around the world, it comes as no surprise that companies need to prepare for unexpected data loss.
You may think that data loss can be caused by a natural disaster such as a landslide, earthquake, and in our very recent case, a hurricane. Although Hurricane Dean is fresh on everyone’s mind, a loss of data can occur from a variety of other reasons.
Data loss can range from a simple click that deleted a file on the network drive or even a deleted table in a database. Both are examples of unintentional or accidental loss. A disk failure, software glitch or corrupted database are failures that can lead to company downtime.
The potential disaster of a pipe leaking water from the ceiling, an electrical fire, or even a virus that penetrates the company firewall and intrusion detection system are possible threats to data loss.
Some of you may think this will never happen inside your company and others feel they are adequately prepared should a situation arise.
However, truth be told, no one is as impenetrable as they believe and according to Symantec’s IT Risk Management Report many recognise the likelihood of this threat. Symantec interviewed more than 500 IT executives worldwide throughout 2006 and concluded that 58 per cent of executives expect a major data loss at least once every five years.
The downtime and revenue loss may fluctuate greatly, depending on many factors but there is a constant throughout the company’s business continuity and disaster recovery plans – data recovery. It is vital to a company’s survival that in the event of data loss, whether it be unintentional, a failure, or a disaster that the data can be recovered.
A backup is simply defined as a copy of data that can be used to recover the original in the event of data loss. Data backups have a wide range of media that can be used to store data from an 8mm tape to store smaller amounts of data to Linear Tape Open (LTO), DVDs, and other media types for large amounts of data.
For example, a full backup may be performed once a week while an incremental backup is performed daily, allowing for a system to be restored to a certain point in time. After a rotation has been developed and the data is backed up to media the story does not end here. Safely securing and storing the media is necessary to having data available to retrieve.
In Cayman many businesses have in fact implemented data backup and off site storage solutions, however some still have not or have inadequate procedures to ensure data availability.
Of concern in many cases, is the fact that certain system administrators either leave their 8mm back up tapes in the backup equipment or in close proximity to the production environment, or carry them home for the evening/weekend.
In the first example, these tapes would be rendered useless if the data centre/computer room is compromised. Or in the case of the tapes that are taken home these tapes travel in an uncontrolled environment i.e. lack of security and exposure to high temperatures.
Both examples pose a potential for unrecoverable data.
Storage of data is pivotal in the success of unintentional data loss, disaster recovery or business continuity. The media should be stored in a secure offsite location on a rotational cycle to complement your backup schedule.
In our example, you could use a convenient daily drop off for the current day’s media to pick up the incremental backup for a defined period of time whilst storing the full weekly backup for a longer period. The secure location should be monitored with controlled access to permit limited individuals to your company data.
Environmental controls should be in place to protect your data, such as fire and alarm monitoring as well as gas suppression to avoid damage to media. In addition, it may be beneficial to have access to this media 24 x 7 x 365 to fulfil any urgent requirement.
The utilisation of secure media storage is the base for successful data recovery. Where and how your company data is stored may impact revenues in the event of a data loss.
I leave you with one question. Are you using secure media storage methods?
John Durrant is a Senior Consultant in the Enterprise Risk Services group at Deloitte and has over four years experience in the design, implementing and testing of data security and availability solutions. John can be contacted on 345 814 3354, or emailed at [email protected].
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