What’s your problem?
April 4th, 2008
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

