Johannesburg, 19 Jan 2016
This is a three-part series of articles from AgileCloud, designed to assist you with your company's backup and restore planning and objectives, which can also be used as a check list.
Backups, restores, and data recovery operations are some of the most important tasks that an IT organisation performs. Businesses cannot risk losing access to data for any significant amount of time; therefore, the organisation should develop and follow a detailed plan, commonly called a backup strategy.
An all-encompassing master backup strategy can be difficult to apply consistently due to differences in staffing and technologies that typically exist throughout an organisation from one business unit to another. It may be valuable to develop individual strategies for various business units or user groups, depending on application usage.
An understanding of the following concepts is important when developing a backup strategy:
What is backup?
A backup is the process of periodically moving data from one type of medium (typically hard disk) to a secondary storage medium for potential retrieval at a later date (short-term, usually within a few days to a couple of months). The secondary storage medium is most often magnetic tape, but may also include hard disk, CD-ROM, and optical disk. Write specific policies to inform users of their responsibilities regarding backups. For example, personal data is typically the responsibility of individual users to store and restore. Company data is often stored on servers that are subject to scheduled backups, thereby ensuring data restore and recovery capabilities. Write procedures that explain these policies to users along with the defined backup schedules for different classes of data.
What is archival storage?
Archival storage, sometimes referred to as "data archiving", is essentially the same task as a backup, except the intent is to store the data for long periods of time, possibly forever. Often, data must be kept for long periods of time because of legal reasons, and it is important that these reasons be known to the storage manager and taken into account when planning for storage needs.
What is a restore?
A restore is the process of retrieving data (a single file or many files) from a storage medium to a target location (typically a hard disk). In most data centres, there are policies that inform users of their responsibilities with regard to data restores. For example, personal data is typically the responsibility of individual end-users to store and restore. Company data, on the other hand, often has to be stored on servers that are subject to scheduled backups, thereby ensuring data restore and recovery capabilities, should the need arise.
What is a data recovery?
Data recovery is the process of completely restoring data to the state it was in at some prior point in time. Data recovery is usually performed as a result of some kind of disaster that has caused serious data loss, corruption, or both. Although we often think of disasters as being either natural (as in the case of an earthquake) or man-made (as in the case of a computer virus), a disaster can be defined as any event that causes serious interruption to the running of a business. For example, a hard disk crash on a production system could cause an e-commerce system to cease operation, and for many companies, would qualify as a disaster requiring a complete data recovery. Proper planning could mitigate these circumstances.
Classify data
One of the first steps that operations must execute prior to developing a good backup strategy is to classify the various types of data in the IT environment. For example, most organisations do not back up "user data", defined as personal data not related to the business. So, "user data" would be a type of data classification that could be ruled out of scope for scheduled backups and therefore falls to the responsibility of individual users to store.
"Company business data", on the other hand, could be a classification of data that is important to the company and is scheduled for regular backups. Within the "company business data" classification, there could be varying levels of company data, such as "company private", while other data types could be "company resource data", "project data", and so on.
A good rule is to classify data according to its business impact. For example, there is some data the company must have available or the business cannot run - like a parts list for a manufacturing company. This type of data has a high business impact and should be classified accordingly. Sometimes there is data that does not have to be online all the time, but must be available when needed - for example, the testing data generated by medical companies performing drug research. This too could be classified as "high business impact", because the company would be at risk if a product was flawed, and the company could not produce testing data for the last several years.
Define backup requirements
When the different data types have been classified, the requirements and specifications for each data type can be defined. Note: Many of the specific requirements discussed here for determining a productive backup strategy should be provided to IT as the result of SLA development, and not demand much time or effort for IT staff to discover. The service level manager and the customer liaison work with customer management to ensure the customer's business requirements are satisfactorily addressed through the delivery of IT services. These requirements should include backup, restore and recovery business needs, which are then negotiated and eventually committed to by IT. Each of these requirements is discussed in this section to ensure nothing is missed during backup strategy development.
Determine how much data to store
Determine, for each of the different data type, how much data needs to be stored. Whether you are dealing with terabytes of data or megabytes of data will influence the strategy. Understanding this will help to determine the types of devices required for doing the backup, the required media, whether there is sufficient time for the backup or if an online storage method must be considered, and so on.
Part two will cover the following topics: Where the data is located; planning for data growth; backup and restore performance and needs; and more.
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