Online Data Protection Solutions

Data protection is a critical issue these days. It is specially required in big organizations where there is a huge inflow and outflow of critical and valuable information. Protection is required both in distributed and centralized type of storage configurations. This need is being met with online data protection.

Often there are situations like virus attacks, hard disk failure or data leakage, all of which cause data to be corrupted or lost irrevocably. The data which is thus lost during such situations could be of high importance and critical to the achievement of goals in an organization. This loss of data might mean heavy losses to the organization.

As the whole business depends upon the IT infrastructure for high productivity and advantage, data protection measures are of paramount importance to most organizations. Some of the data protection and recovery measures available in the market are:

  • Disk-to-Disk-to-Tape deployment.
  • Online data protection solutions.
  • Remote site data recovery.
  • Online data repository from primary sites for both Active-Active and Active-Passive configurations.
  • IP firewalls, VPN, Ipsec for WAN configurations.

Online data protection measures are suitable for those environments where the data is more critical and the cost of down time increases. Under such circumstances, the customers are needed to make use of some online repository for data protection and recovery. The various on line data protection measures are as follows:

1. Snapshots
Taking snapshots is a feature of networked storage solutions which enable the user to create online copies of the data instantly. Snapshots help in avoiding duplicating disk blocks that are in a snapshot as well as on the active file system. These snapshots can however work within a range of a campus or a center.

2. Remote site data recovery
To save data from disasters like earthquakes or incidents of natural sabotage, a disaster recovery plan can be used for any enterprise in the form of a Disaster Planning template. This template comes in the form of a word document containing a disaster handling plan, business continuity template, work plan, IT and business impact analysis questionnaire. The template also contains issues related to completely protecting the financial and other data. These are data which are required to meet the reporting regulations and also meet the future requests for clarification of necessary reports.

Online Data Protection comprises the following:

  1. Plan introduction
  2. Business impact analysis
  3. DRP organization responsibilities
  4. Back up strategy
  5. Recovery strategy
  6. Disaster recovery procedures
  7. Plan administration
  8. Technical appendix
  9. Job description
  10. Work plan

In order to meet disaster recovery in a most cost effective way, various configurations are available. These configurations use different technologies. One can choose from these configurations depending on how effective it is from the cost point of view. These configurations also differ in the range of the areas they cover. For example, an Active-Active configuration uses mirroring technology to provide frequent incremental updates and cover an area within a campus or a center. Then, there is WAN configuration that uses IP firewall technology and covers a distance much larger than a campus or metro area.

Thus, it could be seen that a number of online data protection procedures are available that give highly sophisticated solutions in the field of data protection and recovery.