Data Storage: How To Protect Business Continuity

In the current digital era, data storage has become a key component of IT infrastructures. It is a collection point for data that is functional to business processes, which links the work of divisions and departments and facilitates exchange with partners and customers. Business continuity today can only do with adopting technological tools, methodologies, and services suitable for guaranteeing the resilience of networks, systems, and data storage, as well as mitigating the risks associated with data loss and cybersecurity.

In short, business continuity depends on the ability to protect the IT infrastructure through design approaches that start from an examination of the value chains in the company and then decline the need for continuity with the most appropriate technological solutions and procedural and organizational changes.

Resources for server and data storage resiliency

In the language of continuity, the words that come up most frequently are high availability, disaster recovery, and business continuity. High availability is a feature of server and data storage systems built to ensure high uptime through redundant power, CPU, memory, and disk components, as well as specialized control systems capable of replacing failed resources without or with little impact on performance.

The measure of uptime is translated commercially with a given percentage that expresses the operating time compared to the downtime, which can be equal to 99.9%, for a system capable of limiting unavailability to within 9 hours per year, by 99.99% if the stops last a maximum of 52 minutes, and 99.999% if limited to just 5 minutes.

On the other hand, disaster recovery concerns the set of IT components and strategies to remedy an incident that has produced physical or logical damage (let’s think of a malware attack) involving servers and data storage up to the entire data center site. A set that includes the technological and logistic/organizational measures to restore systems and data, then restart as soon as possible.

First, business continuity is organizational resilience; in addition to technology, it requires knowledge of risk, emergency plans, and specific skills. High availability and disaster recovery are necessary but only sometimes sufficient to ensure business continuity. Under the hat of business, continuity is included in the resilience aspects of servers, data storage, and networks and in the human and organizational aspects that allow the company to continue functioning.    

Business continuity with tailor-made projects

The first step in creating projects concerning business continuity and data storage protection always concerns the analysis of the customer’s infrastructure, therefore, of what is necessary for operations in terms of RTO (recovery time objective) and RPO (recovery point objective). This analysis follows the choice of the most suitable type of project to respond to business needs.

Suppose, in some situations, it may be enough to protect the data storage with an external copy of the data updated every 15 or 30 minutes that can be used, for example, to carry out disaster recovery in the event of an IT attack or breakdown, in others. In that case, it is necessary to deal with greater complexities. The need not to lose operations and transactions, even for a few instants, translates into structural interventions involving data storage, servers, and applications by creating duplicate resources in twin sites and the necessary synchronous data replication mechanisms.

Safeguarding data storage and servers with managed services and the cloud

The complexity and costs of business continuity depend on the speed of restart times. Some solutions can take advantage of cloud services for data storage and on-demand enabling virtual machines that can replace those unavailable on corporate sites.

Also Read : The Essential Data Loss Prevention Checklist