What You Need to Know About Data Availability: An Overview

The time for managing your data with greater intelligence is here.

In December, Gartner, Inc. forecasted worldwide enterprise security spending to total $96.3 billion in 2018, stating awareness of emerging threats and the evolution to a digital business strategy as main factors.

As companies become more data aware, here are the five key questions that you should be asking your data management team:

1. Where and how exactly is your data stored?
2. What is your Business Continuity requirements?
3. Is the company’s enterprise data storage GDPR-compliant?
4. What happens in the event of a disaster?
5. Is your data being intelligently stored?

What Does Intelligent Data Availability Look Like?

Disaster Recovery

Business resiliency begins with the protection of systems and data across your entire environment. Any enterprise organisation should be ready to recover systems to full capacity and retrieve assets within the recovery time and recovery point objectives (RTOs/RPOs) your business requires.

This is what you should be looking for in a comprehensive Disaster Recovery Checklist:

• Application, Image or SAN level replication
• Tier 3+ data centre facilities in your specified recovery location
• 2048-bit SSL encryption for data replication to your chosen data centre
• Options to connect client production and DR environments via Layer 2 or Layer 3 links
• The ability to choose a point in time to recover to, if your data has been breached.
• Support of an experienced service provider under the governance of ISO27001 for the duration of a DR event
• The availability of high-speed managed internet connectivity for the duration of a DR event
• An assisted planned DR test every six months
• 24×7 support for connectivity and performance assistance.
• Standard Service reporting on DR status as well as all request fulfilments and incidents

Enterprise Backup

The loss of data can close your company’s doors permanently. A fully managed, remote backup and restore service eliminates the need for manual tape loading and removal off-site, allowing users to work without interruption and ensuring round-the-clock data protection.

This is what you should be looking for in a comprehensive Backup Checklist:

• 30-day standard on-disk data retention
• Full back-up encryption
• SAN storage for resilient archiving of backup data
• Flexible solutions that provide Backup capabilities for physical and virtual environments as well as Cloud solutions such as AWS, Azure, Office 365 etc
• Frequent restore testing to ensure the integrity of backed up data – including full restore of sample file/image/application
• Scheduled testing and CRC checks for consistency with source data
• Quarterly service reports
• Real-time monitoring and proactive management 24×7
• No single point of failure
• Data deduplication

Business Continuity

Unexpected events such as outages, infrastructure failure or Mother Nature can prevent you from running your business. You need to consider where and how your staff will continue to work if the worst happens.

This is what you should be looking for in a comprehensive Business Continuity Checklist:

• Dedicated seating in various recovery suites with access to public transport and parking
• 1Gb resilient connectivity to comprehensive DR systems in the event of disaster
• Large team of engineers available on-site for transition period
• Technical assistance with system recovery
• RFID access restricted suites
• Conference rooms with video & telephone conferencing
• At least 100Mb Internet connection
• Voicemail & contact centre including call recording if required

Digital Planet is Ireland’s largest indigenous Cloud, unmatched in delivering secure and compliant Enterprise-class Cloud solutions across Tier 3+ data centres in Ireland, UK and the US with ISO 27000 and ISO 20000-1 accreditation, and PCI DSS availability.