The Truth about Data Loss: What’s a Company to Do?

By FarStone Marketing Dept.
This article was first published in Dr. Dobb’s Journal

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A Harsh Reality

Data loss is an unpleasant fact of modern life. 99.9% of all businesses have experienced at least one costly incident of data loss; causes include operating system (OS) crashes, failed software installations or updates, user error, power outages, and hard drive failure. These incidents can have such a damaging effect that they are sometimes called “digital disasters.”

According to a report by Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu, more than 50 percent of businesses have suffered non-recoverable data loss at one time or another. Just how serious is the problem? The report goes on to say that one-third of all digital disasters will result in financial setback.

So what’s a business to do?

Back It Up (It’s the Law)!

Of course, businesses have a financial incentive to safeguard their electronic data. But now there’s an even more compelling reason to do so – it’s the law! The Sarbanes Oxley Act (SOX) of 2002 requires business to retain certain kinds of information for specific durations. Lost data could put a business out of compliance with SOX and invite in possible legal action. The most common types of business data that need to be protected include: financial information, business plans, employee data, classified or technical information under a non-disclosure agreement (NDA), product or service data and working documents, and communication documents (emails). Regardless of the type of data, the new rule of thumb is that documents need to be kept in a tamper-proof format for at least five years. Taking all this into consideration, it is recommended that businesses develop a comprehensive data recovery plan to prevent unnecessary data loss in the event of a digital disaster. Here’s how…

Things to Consider When Building a Data Recovery Plan

Start out by identifying the necessary elements of a data recovery plan. Then evaluate the potential pitfalls of possible solutions for backing up critical business data.

The elements critical to building a good data recovery plan include:

• Defining the possible disaster scenarios and understanding the impact on downtime, the number of people affected, and how it could hinder your daily operations.
• Minimizing the effects of possible disasters through the selection and implementation of sound backup systems and procedures.
• Documenting this information in written form as your company’s official “disaster recovery plan” and include who is responsible for recovery.
• Reviewing your backup strategy on a yearly basis to determine if preset responses to the possible scenarios you’ve charted above are still valid and updating them if not.

General categories of backup solutions include tape, digital media, hardware RAID, software solutions, and hosted services. All of these have advantages for being reliable components of a data recovery plan. But with each of these categories, there are known limitations that also cast doubt on the likelihood of successfully recovering all critical data following a crash scenario.

Potential problems a company can run into when trying to recover data include:

• Incomplete recovery due to missing data (if backup points were never tested for reliability to know there was a problem)
• Long recovery periods resulting in interrupted business operations
• Partial recovery resulting from lack of real-time backups (in other words, businesses can only get back the data at their most recent backup, which hopefully wasn’t last work week)

Another potential problem arises for companies that have a distributed workforce (mobile workers, telecommuters, branch offices, etc.). Measures should be taken to protect the corporate-owned knowledge on all laptops used in the field and all desktops used in home offices. Typically, business data recovery plans only focus on corporate networks, and this oversight will leave the remote worker particularly vulnerable when they experience data loss.

Now that you’ve considered the necessary elements and potential pitfalls of a data recovery plan, it’s time to build a plan that’s right for your business.

A Promising Solution: Continuous Data Protection

A good solution for data recovery is continuous data protection (CDP). CDP is a methodology that enables recovery of data from any point in the past. All CDP solutions incorporate these three fundamental attributes: 1. Data modifications are continuously captured or tracked in real-time; 2. All data modifications and incremental changes are stored in a separate location from the primary data; and 3. Recovery point objectives are arbitrary and need not be defined in advance of the actual recovery.

As more CDP solutions become available in the market, this methodology is most important to a business data recovery plan because it provides the greatest flexibility in recovering lost business data and at a higher success rate.

Using CDP, a business can pick a point in time just before the data loss was discovered and recover most, if not all, of the lost data. In addition, success of data recovery is dependant on the number of backup points the business has to select from. For example, if a business chooses to restore all data captured from ten minutes prior to the digital disaster, but that isn’t good enough to recover the most up-to-date data, CDP allows the business to select another backup point closer to the incident that caused the data loss. The business has the ability to recover more current data than it would by strictly relying on a single backup made the day prior.

All in all, CDP offers a higher success rate of total data recovery, making it an optimal choice for data recovery plans.

Solving the Mobile Dilemma

Now comes the hard part. Once you have a good corporate data recovery plan in place, how do you ensure your distributed workforce is also covered?

There’s a solution called personal disaster recovery (PDR) that allows an end user or remote worker to quickly and easily recover an individual workstation, laptop or edge server without needing external IT support to do it. PDR software solutions can supplement a business’s data recovery plan and provide considerable cost and time savings.

Here’s how it works: Typically installed as either a standalone client software solution or as a network solution for up to 25 connected workstations, PDR solutions create a hidden protected partition on the PC. The software then provides the user with the ability to set and make incremental backups to this hidden partition at the interval of their choice (i.e. every five minutes or every ten minutes). When needed, the user can recover missing data at any of these incremental backup points.

The PDR actually makes a complete snapshot of the hard drive, which can become the new master system image in case of hard drive failure, the need to migrate to new hardware or the need to reconfigure their system to defined parameters on a regular basis.

The software should be accessible from within the operating system as well as contain a pre-OS interface. Because the software loads before the OS, it is not dependent on the OS working properly. In the case of an operating system crash resulting in a “blue screen of death,” PDR software can be accessed upon reboot, post OS crash, and the user can select a backup point from the pre-OS interface to restore the system, thus fixing the OS problem.

Most PDR solutions should also have the ability to store backups on network drives, external USB drives and CD/DVD media. Finally, security features such as password protection should be included to control access and prevent accidental recovery to an earlier point in time when not actually needed.

As mentioned above, the real success of any backup solution is in the frequency of the backups that are made. As with CDP solutions, PDR backups happen automatically. The user can set it and forget it as the software runs silently in the background recording all sector-level changes that occur on the system. By keeping a log of all changes, the software can easily revert to a backup point prior to the point of data loss. Easy-to-find and quick recovery saves the user a significant amount of downtime.

The Moral of the Story

IT administrators who manage both a corporate network and have responsibilities to remote/branch offices realize that a solid data recovery plan includes coverage for both onsite and offsite employees. When putting solutions in place to support successful data recovery, IT administrators can gain the most benefit by incorporating the CDP methodology at corporate headquarters and using PDR solutions for the distributed workforce. Taking these simple steps will prevent your business from becoming another statistic of data loss and unsuccessful data recovery.