Data Recovery Planning: The First Step

Jon William Toigo   Today’s Top Stories    or  Other Disaster Recovery Stories  

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April 19, 2004 (Computerworld) -- The following is excerpted from the book, Disaster Recovery Planning: Preparing for the Unthinkable, 3rd edition, by Jon William Toigo. It is posted with permission from publisher Prentice Hall PTR, copyright 2003, all rights reserved.

For a data recovery plan to be meaningful, it must ensure the "right" data -- data that is required by critical business processes and necessary for recovery -- is identified, safeguarded against loss, and made available in an acceptable recovery timeframe. This is a deceptively simple premise. Consider these facts:

• Depending on the analyst one reads, data is growing at a rate of between 70 to 100% per year in most corporations. Replicated data, "enhanced" data (e.g., document files with graphics, sound clips and other data objects embedded), and large program files account for some of this growth -- perhaps as much as 50%, according to some analysts. However, the balance is new data, including e-mail and transaction entries in databases, that is constantly being created and stored by end-users and automated systems.


• A significant percentage (some argue as much as 80%) of the data stored on hard disk drives is never referenced again. This applies to databases as well as files, fostering significant discussion of the possibility of shortening data recovery timeframes by "prestaging" static or nonchanging data at the recovery center.


• Databases measured in terabytes are becoming commonplace within Fortune 1000 firms. Even in medium-sized firms, it is not uncommon to find databases sized in the 400 to 700 GB range.


• In most companies, policies and standards do not exist for the classification of data by its importance to the organization. According to the 1998 Information Week/PricewaterhouseCoopers Global Information Security Survey, 43% of the 1600 companies surveyed worldwide indicated that they never classify data and 14% classify their records only on an annual basis. [2] Says George Symons, vice president of product management and development with Legato Systems, Inc., "Today CIOs are being forced to determine the relative importance of different applications.
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  Data Recovery Planning: The First Step

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• Data Recovery Planning: The First Step

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