IT Pros: Verify that Data Protection Plans Are Working Properly

A logical first step to ensure company data is safe and secure is for IT leaders to create a data protection plan. It’s becoming more difficult to develop that plan as the definition of data that businesses must protect expands, though planning is still an important initial step.

And it’s only the first step. IT pros must also continuously test the plan to ensure it’s fully implemented and that it works properly.

Jon William Toigo, CEO and managing principal of Toigo Partners International and chairman of the Data Management Institute, writes in TechTarget about how technology tools can help IT leaders verify that data protection strategies are effective.

“Done properly, data protection requires the assignment of the right set of protection services to the right data. The ‘right’ service in this context is defined as the most appropriate, given the criticality of the application or business process being protected and its associated recovery time requirements,” Toigo says.

There is no “one size fits most” strategy, Toigo says, so it’s up to each company to select the appropriate mix of technologies to keep different data sets secure and easily recoverable in case of a data disaster. His tips include:

• Think beyond replication: Organizations should protect against errors once the data is created and validated. Techniques include continuous data protection to combat application errors, mirroring to counter equipment failure and offsite storage to protect against natural disasters that could affect an entire region. IT leaders can hedge against the latter by using the “3-2-1” rule, which calls for three copies of data, in two different formats with one stored offsite.  
• Constantly test disaster recovery processes: IT data environments are more complex than ever, and it’s not sufficient for IT to merely set data protection recovery processes and move on. Instead, Toigo suggests that organizations test their processes incrementally — but constantly — to save time and money.

Read the full article at TechTarget

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