I know that it does not sound too customer friendly, but really, when it comes to figuring out what the best solutions are to better protect your data assets, you’d better know what you’re protecting against.  So I am asking every customer I get to speak to:  do you really know what your problem is?  
As my colleague Dennis Wenk often says, the focus has too often been placed on the ‘tornadoes, fires, floods, hurricanes”.    The reality is that these don’t happen that often, and frankly, if you think your CFO is going to fund a BC/DR project because a terrible event like this may or may not happen…try luck. 
You are actually more likely to get hit by a logical disaster, like corruption, or a virus.  And the cost or impact to your organization might be just as high.  So my point is that it is important to spend the time understanding what the problems are, and really what risks your organization is exposed to.
What I mean is that if your data protection problem is data corruption for example, with the consequences and the domino effects it may have on all parts of the organization, then certain strategies like cyclical replicas of data volumes will do wonders for you.  But not distance replication.  
If you have one data center, with all your eggs (data) in it…let’s hope nothing makes it unavailable.  I don’t mean a plane hitting it (probability of maybe 1 in 10,000 years)…but may be a power grid failure affecting the area, a major freeway being closed and affecting the workforce, etc.  There are many types of threats, some of them very mundane, that could affect your operations.  It really doesn’t take a hurricane.  So it is really going to help your risk profile if you have data replicated at a safe distance.
My colleague Ros Schulman, another partner in crime and author of many papers and a frequent speaker at BC events remembers a customer situation caused by a backed-up toilet on an upper floor from the data center. You should hear the bad jokes we make on this one!  Most technology these days is not water-cooled, let’s leave it at that.
So where does that leave us?  Start with understanding the problem by assessing your threats, risks and exposures.  I recommend an operational risk assessment.
Understanding your operational risk factors, and monetizing them is key.  This allows you to better understand what your options are, and will help identify the type of architecture you need to build from a data storage perspective.   Take a look at the links below for a great white paper on the subject.
If you want to learn more about these issues – you can bookmark this date now. Dennis Wenk will be presenting in a session on Data Loss & the Justification of IT Resilience at the the International Safety & Security Conference (NYC, October 13-14). 
Also please read some Dennis Wenk’s and Ros Schulman’s papers on our website. 
See the links below:
http://www.hds.com/assets/pdf/wp_183_risk_mgmt_bc.pdf

http://www.hds.com/assets/pdf/wp_wenk_bertrand_dataprotection_238_00_en.pdf

http://www.hds.com/assets/pdf/wp_117_02_disaster_recovery.pdf

http://www.hds.com/assets/pdf/wp_200_data_integrity_asynch_rep.pdf

Welcome to the Hitachi Data Systems Business Continuity blog. Let’s get something out of the way right now, since you’re taking the time to read this! I am a product and solutions marketer, so I love my technology. I even get paid for it! This being said, I’ve been in the backup and data protection business for a while and with a variety of vendors, so I really want this blog to be about what’s happening in this space and how technology helps or sometime complicates the quest for data protection.

I have spent a lot of time talking to customers and partners about what Business Continuity really is, and invariably, I get a different answer every time I ask people to define it. It is fascinating to me how a simple question can yield so many different answers. It’s usually a combination of “backup”, “disaster recovery”, “high availability” and other permutations with complicated acronyms. I know a lot of these myself, but no one is impressed anymore.

There’s really an elephant in the room when I ask the question – and it’s usually about money and priorities. Seriously, the business and IT decisions that provide the backbone of your IT infrastructure are very complex ones to arrive at, when you do… Let me explain, in many ways, the idea that you have to be in business to backup or recover data assets is somewhat unnatural to many storage and data center managers. Can we blame them?

We’re in the middle of a hurricane that’s deluging petabytes of data on us. I hear customers telling me how their data growth rate is double or triple digits year-on-year, and their budgets not necessarily commensurate (heard this one before?). I recently read an article based on research from a well-known storage analyst that explains how private sector archiving will soon be at tens of thousands of petabytes (that’s a lot of zeros!) of archived data. How do we manage all of these data assets, let alone protect them efficiently and effectively?

So, in this blog, I would like to explore, in time, and with the help of many friends, colleagues, and my keen sense of observation, how we can do a better job driving IT decisions that are essentially intrinsic to how a business needs to be managed, how data assets should be protected, and what technologies can help. How’s that for fun? And expect to hear from what some customers are REALLY doing, and not just the marketing glossies.

Some of the themes I’ll be covering in the next few weeks will revolve around business and technologies like backup and data replication. I asked a few people what they’d be interested in, and there are many technology themes to cover such as multiple data center topologies , managing data protection environments, thin provisioning and replication, very large mainframe environments and replication, de-duplication, the impending death of tape (not so fast!!). On the business front, which really drives the decision, I’ll be spending time on the theme of operational efficiency and resilience, mitigating risks, return on investment vs. data loss, and many more.

What themes would you like to see covered?

Before I go, let me ask you a loaded question: What are your chances of recovering your top 5 critical applications (Do you have those ranked by the way?) should a major interruption hit your data center?