Data Management Mistakes Make Disaster Recovery Even More Difficult

Data is the the basis for almost all of your company’s operations. From driving marketing strategies to feeding innovation, you rely on having immediate access to your data, and this is why making sure that you have the proper safeguards in place is so critical. When data is needed and not readily available, the costs can be very high, delaying projects and deliverables and quickly impacting revenues, and nowhere is this more evident than in a disaster recovery scenario. Assuming that your data has been protected via regular scheduled backups via your file archiving software, the most critical elements of your operational data still needs to be restored as quickly as possible when disaster strikes. The key to doing this effectively lies in both properly identifying what is most important for your organization’s operation and being able to recover that data in the shortest possible time. Having a cloud-based file archiving solution in place allows for continuous availability and faster recovery.

Cloud-based disaster recovery systems offer a number of benefits, including the reduced costs of online data storage and increased availability of Terabytes for other applications, but even when you have the most efficient data storage management solution in place, when you are dealing with a system, site or regional outage you need to be able to quickly gather the data that you need in order to meet your service-level requirements, leaving extraneous information out of the mix. In order to do this effectively, it is essential that your data management strategy distinguishes between what needs to be recovered immediately and what is less relevant and intended for archiving. This means that when dealing with a cloud-based file archiving solutions system, the conversation regarding data recovery shifts from concerns about space and required hardware to making sure that the data is being tiered and managed properly so that necessary data can be prioritized for recovery. Your organization needs to work closely with your file archiving solutions provider to ensure that there is a disaster recovery plan in place that prioritizes the specific applications and data that are most critical to your operations. The plan must also identify the amount of time that is acceptable for recovery so that expectations are properly managed.

By identifying and archiving the data that is not essential to your day-to-day operations as well as your high-value data assets, you are better able to manage a disaster recovery scenario while also saving the time and cost involved in backing up and restoring terabytes of information. Usage intelligence and data classification paired with effective file sharing applications means that while all of your data assets are protected, the data that you need most is most immediately available.