Efficiency meets data loss prevention in ‘09?
By: Christophe Bertrand on January 15, 2009
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In December I attended a presentation by a storage vendor who discussed backup solutions for VMware environments, and coming away from it I have to admit they certainly had plenty of options and technologies. They have an impressive portfolio but… it was very confusing to identify what to use and when to use it, not to mention everything had lots of tradeoffs. I left the session feeling there is a real practices or maturity problem in our overall approach to data protection for the enterprise in virtualized environments. Good thing a vacation was coming so I could forget about this for a while!
In any event, a couple of days ago I happened to be reading the latest CIO magazine (January 1) which includes a feature on the State of the CIO in 2009. You can easily guess that there was a healthy dose of doom and gloom (not surprising). But what got my attention was an article focused on IT spending—and more specifically—the top areas and practices for expected focus in ’09.
“Efficiency is the name of the game” – for sure. And guess what? Data loss prevention makes the top 5 (it’s actually a top 4 tie in the “currently researching” section). In the “currently implementing” section, top 1 and 2 is none other than virtualization (first place for server; second for storage). Yes, that’s right. Storage virtualization…music to my ears (see page 56 of the issue in question).
So when you look at this in combination, preventing data loss in massively virtualized environments is a going to become a very hot topic in 2009 (as if we needed more hot topics). I think that’s great news and also a great challenge for many organizations. That’s not to say the other key functions aren’t critical as well – for example: provisioning, distributing and tuning the infrastructure – or should I say… “the cloud”?
The net is that there’s a pretty big gap in best practices today in BC/DR/data loss prevention for end-to-end virtualized environments, but this year will be key year to address these topics. Something to look forward to, no?
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Alexandra Toy on 24 Feb 2009 at 8:18 am
Indeed, the time is right to tackle the BC/DR data loss prevention. In addition, I found advice from Med Yones, a global business coach, saying that companies should formulate recovery plans to establish recovery time /recovery point objectives and to guide each business unit through successful recovery following a major disaster. For more useful advice click on the webpage below
http://www.iim-edu.org/executivejournal/WhitePaperBusinessContinuityDisasterRecoveryBCDRBestPractices.htm