Data protection and recovery is all about the data: moving the data, securing the data for proper access, or staging the devices that help people to use the data. Even with all of the access controls in place, the proper flow to the right device, and the assurance that the data is genuine and safe, an authorized user still has the capability to click Save instead of Save As, overwriting good data with bad, or deleting the final version along with the drafts. There is always the potential threat of physical loss of data due to natural disasters or accidents.

Good data protection minimizes downtime due to data loss and maximizes the productivity of both your IT organization and your user community.

Business Challenges
There are several business challenges involved in adequately protecting and ensuring the recoverability of data.

• Within the larger organization, IT is often isolated from the business units, which results in IT not being aware of recovery goals, retention requirements for data, which data needs to be protected and how often.
• Within the IT organization, backup is usually perceived as a mundane activity with more costs than benefits. In single-site organizations, backup is already difficult based on what data needs to be protected. In distributed multisite organizations, remote backups are often considered impractical, resulting in each site doing its own backups, with IT often responsible for their success but with no means to ensure it.
• While backups are often thought of as preparation for whole server recovery, most data restores are single files—which results in a constant barrage of interruptions to IT team members as they help users restore files that were overwritten or deleted, affecting IT productivity in rolling out new services in a timely manner.

Technology Challenges
Key factors associated with data protection include:

• The recovery goals of the business versus the recovery capabilities in the protection solution.
• The distance between the production data and the protection solution.
• The "protectability" of the various data sources within the environment.
  

Recovery Goals
In the past, data protection usually took one of two extreme forms: synchronous mirrored hardware or nightly tape backup. With synchronous solutions the disk was eliminated as a point of failure because a second was always in sync, but at a cost that was prohibitive for all but the largest institutions. Even for those that have synchronous mirrors of their data, the data is not protected and because there is only one logical instance, any incorrect writing to the file damages both physical iterations. In addition, a single server with synchronous disks still has significant points of failure that make both disk copies inaccessible.

The only other traditional alternative was nightly tape backup, which presents its own set of issues:

• When data is protected only once per day (in the middle of the night), any data created during the business day and then later overwritten or deleted can never be recovered.
• While many companies perform backup in anticipation of a total server or disk rebuild, 97 percent of all restores are for single files or directories. This forces tape drives to spin rapidly forward and back repeatedly, in a process called shoe-shining, to locate the exact 1/8-inch of tape media that holds the single file to be restored. In general, tape is not an efficient restoration medium; tape is a safe long-term retention medium.
• Finally, tape restores of data have always been plagued with problems, including corrupt indexes, mislabeled cartridges, unreadable media, recovery of off-site tapes, and other issues. Moreover, by using a media solution that is by nature offline, the IT staff is permanently relegated to handling restores. Many find the speed of tape restores to be insufficient, which is one of many reasons why virtual tape libraries (VTL) enable faster disks to be presented as tape for use by tape backup products. An improvement beyond that is disk-to-disk, which enables disks to be used directly, instead of being misrepresented as tape, to alleviate many of the other deficiencies of tape.

Distance from Production to Protection
Simply having redundant disk or tape backups does not satisfy most business recovery goals, mostly due to distance. If a building suffers any kind of flooding, wind, fire, or other catastrophe, both disks and the tapes on the shelves next to the server often suffer the same fate.

For data to be protected adequately, the redundant data, in whatever form, must be in a different geographic location and not susceptible to whatever potential calamity might affect the production server or servers.

And while a certain percentage of companies have off-site storage for their key data centers, regional locations and branch offices often go unprotected. Statistically speaking, up to 60 percent of corporate data exists outside of the data center, so even those well-prepared environments may have only 40 percent of what they need to resume doing business. Meanwhile, the off-site service itself may have costs and inconsistencies that minimize their value for all but the most dire of crises.

The "Protectability" of Various Data Sources
Larger IT environments have the ultimate goal of one protection solution that sufficiently backs up and is reliably able to restore every kind of data source. But even in well-managed IT environments, one or two applications always present challenges in protection, and recovery is burdensome if achievable at all. For many, the best solution is to align a few key protection solutions with competency in a variety of specific workloads, often with a single recovery source.

This might mean one protection solution for Microsoft Windows with another for midrange systems, or perhaps one solution for Microsoft SQL Server and Microsoft Exchange while something else protects Oracle and SAP. One of those protection solutions will often have a tape backup to protect the other.

While everyone might like a single solution that backs up everything well and reliably restores any given workload, the reality is some data protection solutions aim for broad coverage but fall short on advanced application workloads, while other solutions focus on providing the best backups and more reliable restores of targeted workloads, with the expectation that these solutions may need to coexist.

Consider the workloads to be protected first, not the goal of one backup vendor.

WHAT THG CAN DO
Mitigating the technical and business challenges of data protection and recovery includes a few basic activities, followed by a series of additional practices that can build on each other.

Identify and Protect Your Critical Servers
While this may seem obvious, many customers are surprised when they take an honest look at what the business impact would be if a given server were unrecoverable. Certainly, some SQL Server databases or Exchange mail servers are intuitively key to business operation, but what about the primary file server for the management team, or the server that maintains inventory for a retail organization? After identifying the servers critical to the business, don't just ask the IT or storage team, but ask the key users, business stakeholders, and application owners: Are you protected? Have you ever needed data restored, and was that successful? In many cases, IT staffs find that while they think they have been adequately backing up, the occasional failed restore or the recovered files that were unreadable data have resulted in significant business or productivity loss.

When you have successfully protected all of your critical servers, you have achieved a basic level of data protection.

Protect the Branch Offices-Without Remote Tapes
To protect the key business data that exists outside of a fortified data center, and to achieve distance-based protection for all company data, you must successfully deploy a centralized backup solution for branch offices.

Eliminating remote tape devices can reduce multiple labor costs. The nontechnical branch personnel who were responsible for, but not always performing, the task of rotating tapes between backups and reinserting tapes for restores can disregard that task and focus on their intended business function. The corporate IT team no longer has to remotely check and troubleshoot the numerous remote backup jobs, nor be dispatched to do maintenance on the ever-failing branch office tape drives and media.

Instead, the data should be protected disk to disk, using partial file, partial-byte, or partial-block technology to ensure a second copy of the data resides at the corporate location, without pulling whole files across the enterprise WAN. From the central copy, competent IT staff can perform tape backups at any time, instead of at 2 A.M. And the data is protected from regional crises and weather, providing rapid disaster recovery capability for all branch office data, which can account for up to 60 percent of critical information.

Recognize That Tape Is Insufficient
Because of the business impact of the downtime costs of critical servers, and because nightly tape backups can result in up to a day of data loss, today's data protection solution should include better-than-daily protection. You need disk to-disk and partial file, partial byte, or partial-block technology to send updates every few hours, instead of protection only at night. The result helps ensure less rework when data is lost—perhaps redoing only the last hour instead of the entire day—which can lead to higher productivity, higher employee morale, and improved customer satisfaction.

Ensure Protection of All Servers
This point might seem obvious, but interviews with the application owners, business stakeholders, and key users will likely reveal anecdotes and negative recollections of recoveries that failed.

Providing a reliable backup solution for all servers, including branch offices, which reduces lost productivity for your business will bring your organization to a stable or standardized level of data protection.

With a reliable backup in place, further maturity in data protection and recovery can focus on the restoration or the restoration owner.

Enable Users to Recover Their Own Data
One of the greatest burdens in IT, in terms of effort and impact on IT productivity in deploying new services, is the number of requests to restore data. Because the vast majority of restores are single files, directories, or objects, this continuous stream of single needs is not productive. Individual restores are only to recover data lost usually due to human error.

Instead, by enabling users to restore their own data using interfaces that they are already familiar with, such as Windows Explorer or a productivity application like Microsoft Office, IT can help users solve their own needs, feel more empowered, and resume productivity faster, leaving the IT staff to focus on larger issues.

Empower the Application Owners in the Protection Process
To overcome the separation between application stakeholders and those responsible for servers, storage, or backup, enable the stakeholders to provide their own first tier of data protection and recovery.

Because no protection solution provides reliable backup and restoration of every workload imaginable, you may need more than one solution. Encourage application stakeholders to act as protection subject matter experts and keep abreast of technology options. Give them tools that they trust to provide the best backup and restore for the applications they are responsible for, such as SQL Server or Microsoft Exchange Server. Empowered application owners become more confident in the protection process, more agile in restoring data when necessary, and your allies in the company's overall protection strategy, with IT simply backing up their backup in a disk to disk to tape configuration.

This alleviates much of the IT burden to manage backup and restore, other than ensuring the final tapes are created and stored at an alternate location.

If all of these solutions are implemented an organization moves from being a cost center to a strategic asset for the business; with the self-managed disaster recovery plan delivered by disk to disk between sites of all servers, the empowerment of users and application stakeholders, and the IT department focusing on other areas of information management besides backup.

Business Benefits
Establishing a comprehensive, integrated, and simple approach to data protection and recovery can benefit your organization by:

• Improving user productivity by eliminating redundant work caused by lost data.
• Improving IT productivity by dramatically reducing the management efforts around monitoring remote backup jobs and constantly servicing user restore requests.
• Raising employee satisfaction with IT due to less lost data, less downtime, feeling empowered to handle their own issues without "waiting on IT."
• Reducing the cost of backup hardware, software, and media at remote locations.
• Mitigating natural disasters and large crises by automatically and transparently providing disaster recovery of branch offices back to the corporate headquarters.
• Increasing cooperation between application stakeholders and server/storage managers in collectively protecting one of your company's key asset—its data.
  Microsoft entered the data protection and recovery space to help our customers meet these goals. System Center Data Protection Manager 2006 is solving the branch office and file server issues today, while empowering users and lessening IT burdens around remote backup and restore. Data Protection Manager version 2 is currently in public beta to focus on the other Microsoft server workloads, such as SQL Server, Microsoft Exchange Server, and Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007. By combining the best aspects of continuous data protection and traditional tape backup, and smoothly integrating disk and tape, Data Protection Manager is setting a new standard for Windows data protection and recovery.