The ability to capture, store and mine data is core to the success of most businesses, making data protection and business continuity crucial elements of the business process, says Riverbed Technology EMEA marketing director Mark Lewis.
"To ensure ongoing productivity, profitability and shareholder confidence, board members now have to seriously consider the 'what if` factor in their IT planning to protect electronic information," he adds.
Lewis says large-scale natural disasters, political events and data retention regulations of the last decade have reinforced the importance of replicating data to secondary locations away from the central office.
"To complicate matters, many companies now operate from multiple locations, with workers distributed across countries, regions or even on different continents."
In order to comply with the recent rulings, many organisations are examining their infrastructure and considering whether to consolidate IT, he says.
The value of consolidation
"A company with multiple locations generates data at each of its sites. This makes the backup of critical data from each separate site a challenge."
Lewis adds that consolidation of the IT infrastructure simplifies data management and allows IT managers to have a single data centre.
"Consolidation of this kind enables a comprehensive archiving and information life cycle management strategy to be developed. With data located in one or two secure locations, it is easier to keep the information safe and retrieve details from it, or delete items when the time comes."
Lewis believes one of the biggest barriers to achieving this consolidation strategy is the performance of the WAN between locations.
"The system needs to be capable of transporting large amounts of data over long distances to geographically diverse storage centres."
He adds: "Previously, the network protocol constraints slowed down data transfer to an unworkable level. New technologies in the wide-area data services sector can make consolidation an effective disaster recovery system."
Dealing with volume
"Once consolidation has occurred, network-based backup can underpin the business continuity strategy as long as the network can deal with the volume of data," says Lewis.
Restrictive backup windows, limited bandwidth and network latency can significantly reduce the possibility of a company successfully backing up the required data in the time provided, namely, after hours.
"This not only leads to non-compliance, but can also affect the productivity of workers if overrunning backups have to take place during the working day."
To compensate, organisations rotate the backup to certain portions of data. In doing so, if disaster strikes, a remote location may lose several days` worth of files, he says.
"Many businesses throw bandwidth at this backup window problem. Expanding bandwidth can be expensive and often does not solve the situation. Unfortunately, increased bandwidth cannot alter the file protocols and magically speed up the process, so backups will overrun."
He says by optimising the bandwidth utilisation and accelerating the TCP-based applications themselves, the amount of backup data sent over a WAN can be reduced by 60% to 90%.
The crystal ball
"In the event of a disaster or loss of data, the ability to recover files is as critical an element of compliance and business continuity as the ability to backup data.
"Although it is the reverse of backup, the speed at which data traffic can move across the network is still crucial in this situation. Unlike backups that happen at a scheduled time, recovery is a live task that can halt the productivity of the workforce and the revenue of the organisation until it is completed."
Lewis believes companies need to look to the future, because electronic data is increasingly coming under scrutiny from regulators and in the law courts.
"Companies must now look at their data retention and business continuity strategies to protect themselves, but also to demonstrate to shareholders that if the worst happens they are able to recover data effectively and with its integrity intact."
Business must remember "data is king", he says.
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