Data Backup & Archive: A Perfect Partnership by Jennifer Burl

How quickly is your company's data growing? Are you able to efficiently keep up with the added data growth, or are you struggling to find the budget to match your storage needs? If it's the latter, you're not alone.

According to data management expert Jason Buffington in his recent data archive blog for ESG (and the experts here at Iron Mountain) data archival is important no matter your industry, the number of compliance updates required and/or how heavily your industry is regulated.

According to the blog, production storage is growing at roughly 43 percent per year, while secondary storage is growing at about 38 percent each year. In addition to data growth, there are a number of other data challenges that IT experts are facing. Iron Mountain's Data Backup & Recovery Report shows that data recovery, data availability and disaster recovery are the top challenges when it comes to the backup and recovery of data within organizations surveyed. In each of these challenges, having a data archive practice will help you achieve your goals.

Archiving is the answer to dealing with this volume of data on a relatively flat budget, and still being able to access what you need-when you need it. It also gives you the opportunity to backup less active data, enabling you to meet your backup windows and SLAs.

So what factors should you consider when thinking about what is important for an archive? What factors are important when thinking about your backup? Here are some key things to consider:

Archive requirements:

Extended media life - choose media that has a long shelf life

Data authenticity

Low total cost of ownership

Accessibility

Backup and disaster recovery requirements:

High media capacity

Low storage cost per GB

High-performance read/write streaming

Remember that archival storage should not be confused with active data and backup operations. They both address very specific issues-which is why it's a good choice to employ a hybrid strategy that includes both archive and backup components. Remember also that choosing a hybrid technology strategy using tape, disk and cloud storage is also a smart idea-one form of data storage can't fully satisfy all requirements at all stages of the data life cycle.

Still not sure archiving data will benefit your company? Your data must be kept for long periods of time for legal, compliance or regulatory reasons. According to ESG studies, 49 percent of IT pros groom or move their data for the benefit of primary storage (to improve performance and remove stagnant data), while 43 percent do it for backup purposes, such as cleaning up the backup by reducing retention requirements or improving backup performance by protecting less production data. This reduces the backup storage used for long-term retention.

For all of the reasons stated above, it is always a best practice to have an archive strategy to effectively deal with inactive data. That backup/ archival strategy should enable data authenticity, regulatory compliance, media longevity, low total cost of ownership and quick random access. Investing in archival storage that is secure, cost effective and that enables you to get your data back with a simple phone call such as the Iron Mountain Archival Tape Management solution, can prove invaluable to your IT department and your overall enterprise.

Ready to get started with a brand-new archival strategy? Contact Iron Mountain, today.

LINK:	http://blogs.ironmountain.com/2014/service-lines/data-backup-and-recov...
	See more stories from ironmountain

Most recent headlines