Best Practices to Avoid Total Data Disaster: A Real World Example by Jay Livens

In many of my blog posts, I talk about best practices around backup, recovery and offsite tape vaulting. The reality is that these vital processes are critical to the very survival of business. Entities that ignore these suggestions put themselves at significant risk, so I hope at a minimum that most organizations have a basic DR strategy in place. Occasionally, I run across stories of businesses ignoring the best practices which have resulted in catastrophic data loss and every story is an important reminder of the criticality of disaster recovery.

As I have posted in the past, data is the lifeblood of modern businesses. Companies must carefully protect their information. Three critical best practices of data protection include:

Maintain consistent and reliable data protection operations

Implement a comprehensive offsite plan for backup data

Develop a cohesive disaster recovery (DR) plan

These three operations will significantly reduce the likelihood of a significant data loss event. The other day I read the article, Macomb County Suffers without Backup Data Center, published by the local CBS news affiliate in Detroit, MI. It immediately brought to mind these three best practices. Unfortunately, it appears that Macomb County, suffered a total loss situation. Let's look at each best practice and see how Macomb County could have used them to avoid this situation.

Backup and Recovery Strategy: You must have an effective strategy in place to enable recovery in the case of data loss. This will protect from a local outage such as a server or storage failure and enable your operation to recover rapidly. However, a reliable strategy is only part of the solution because it does not address the issue of total site loss. The story does not clearly state whether Macomb leveraged this best practice.

Offsite Policy: An offsite strategy is a critical component of backup recovery. If your backup data is in the same location as your production information then a major event will take out both your primary and backup data with the end result that you lose everything. This must be avoided at all costs since data is critical and the loss of all information would likely be catastrophic for your business. Addressing this situation is easier than it seems. Iron Mountain offers a range of cost effective offsite options that allows customers to send critical information whether on tapes, hard drives or even over the cloud to our secure vaults or data centers. In the case of Macomb, it appears that a more effective offsite strategy could have helped avoid this outage.

DR Strategy: The first two best practices talk about ensuring that your data can be restored; however, that is only part of the problem. Assuming you have the data, you need a plan which describes how you recover your operations after the disaster occurs. The plan will include information such as how to recover your information, what hardware will be required (and ideally pre-staged) to access the information and where all of this will take place. Ideally, end users should not only have a plan, but should test it periodically. This is can be one of the most challenging best practices for companies in today's cost conscious environments, and it appears that Macomb may have struggled here as well.

In summary, Macomb County provides an example of a difficult situation. The article is a bit vague about what exactly happened but it appears that recovering business operations will be difficult for Macomb. Adopting best practices would have prevented much of this data loss and enabled rapid recovery of operations. As a reader of this blog, I encourage you to think about how you adhere to these three best practices and how you would recover from an outage like this. The unfortunate reality is that a catastrophic outage could happen to anyone and consistent backup/recovery operations, offsite policies and DR strategies are critical in helping mitigate the business impact.

LINK:	http://blog.ironmountain.com/2013/service-lines/data-backup-and-recove...
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