In the modern business world, data recovery forms an integral part of disaster contingency plans. These data recovery solutions can retrieve more than 75% of data lost in its original format. Thus, it becomes extremely important for every organisational employee to be aware of modern data recovery programs. This can be done through:
Workshops and Team Sessions: Every employee is more than a cog in the organisational machinery and has to be made aware of processes and data generated in another department. Thus, data recovery has to be for the entire organisation and not for a particular employee chain or department. Employees need to be made aware of warning signs of data loss and the far-reaching consequences of the IT disaster. This ensures employee understanding of the relevance of data recovery. Workshop and team sessions have to be conducted using double-loop learning processes where, the IT technicians become equipped with the programs and are able to train the employees. In addition, learning has to be constant and workshop material has to be reviewed periodically. It ought to be remembered that a great part of the success of the data recovery application lies in the employee knowledge of prevention and awareness of data loss. Usually, employees are unaware of data loss and continue working on hard drives that have crashed.
On the other hand, it is quite impossible to have a complete disaster contingency application for a huge and dynamic organisation such as a multinational corporation. More than 95% of data recovery solutions are short-term with limited retrieval capacity.
Data Recovery Applications
Managing an end-to-end disaster recovery solution across an enterprise is an extremely complex challenge. Different storage data recovery programs offer proprietary disaster recovery solutions. These solutions are usually unique in nature.
IT Infrastructure Challenges: IT infrastructures include a myriad of server, storage, and application platforms. In addition, data and applications often span across distributed or clustered servers and storage. In other words, supporting and protecting this multitude of heterogeneous platforms is a challenge for all data recovery programs. Departmental data recovery programs often lead to network server problems. Usually, organisations run on a centralised server and unique departmental data recovery applications i.e. host-based data recovery solutions, could lead to mass data loss within all organisational departments. Even departments which had not experienced data loss are subject to valuable data loss due to these host-based solutions.
Data Replication Challenges: Enterprises need a disaster recovery solution that delivers a reliable up-to-date remote copy of their critical data. This means that data recovery applications must be cost-effective and not lead to performance degradation. In addition, the program should have minimal storage space meaning retrieval of data in only one copy i.e., the data recovery application should be storage-efficient. Data replication methods are synchronous and asynchronous in nature addressing itself to the specific and dynamic needs of the organisation. Synchronous replication ensures an up-to-date remote copy of the data. Further, this type of replication has a write transaction ensuring an up-to-date copy of the primary site is maintained at a secondary site as well. This means that in the event of IT disaster in the primary site, the secondary site will be consistent with the primary site.
Asynchronous data replication is very narrow and focused as compared to synchronous replication. Asynchronous data replication does not allow for an updated version of data at any secondary site. It is local in nature and is used by local departments within the organisation. Thus, organisational departments use asynchronous data replication, while synchronous data replication is used to protect important valuable data for the entire organisation.
Disadvantages:
Limited in Functionality: Modern data retrieval programs are not holistic but specific in nature. They are not designed to deal with organisational IT failures e.g., host-based replication cannot deal with entire IT failure of an organisation. Similarly, data replication methods, whether synchronous or asynchronous, are prone to many faults.
Synchronous – high latency -- minimal storage – performance degradation – high bandwidth costs
Asynchronous – snapshot data retrieval application – data inconsistency – short-term data storage and retrieval in granular format
Data Retrieval: An organisation is able to recover only 75% of data. This means that 25% of data is lost. There has been no data recovery program till date which encompasses all data retrieval programs and is able to recover all the lost data in original format. Further, the cost of using two data recovery solutions is high and cuts a hole in organisational expenditure.
But, data retrieval is an ongoing continuous process of improvement. In 1999, there were snap shot data replication solutions which were later modified to long-term data retrieval applications in 2002. Soon, there will be data recovery programs which encompass all data replication methods and cover all IT disasters. In the meantime, organisations have to follow some rules:
- Always store data in bits i.e., do not keep all data in one drive.
- Refrain from hooking up all computers to a local server
- Always maintain your hard drives and try to prevent data loss