Data is expanding at a head-spinning rate, thanks to a number of factors: the demands of regulators, the needs of compliance and legal departments, and the increasing reliance on databases for the delivery of goods and services. It's not just an issue of capacity, of course. The integrity and availability of all this data has become more and more critical for profitability, and the 24/7 nature of 21st century business has meant shrinking windows for backup and retrieval processes-not to mention the need for rapid and reliable disaster recovery. Basically, an effective backup, recover and archiving (BURA) strategy comes down to a formula that's simple to state but difficult to achieve:

Business Continuity = Data Protection + Data Availability

How do you know if all your data is protected? And how do ensure the availability of your business-critical information?

 

Reviewing your SLA's

Having agreed-upon SLA's for critical applications that specify level of service, support parameters, system performance guarantees in terms of downtime and point of recovery, and so on, is key. Important questions to ask your customer include:

• Is all your data protected?
• How long does it take to backup your data?
• How do you handle open files and/or active databases?
• What is your Recovery Point Objective (RPO) - that is, the point in time you need to recover to? RPO will determine how often you backup or take a point in time copy of your data.
• What is your Recovery Time Objective - that is, the time period after a system failure within which particular business functions need to be restored? Different applications may have different RTO's. For example, the RTO for payroll functions might be a week or two, but the RTO for order processing might be zero-which means the system can never be down.

It's important to realize that the answers to these questions are not finite. With baseline answers in hand, you need to take the next step: establish an application-based audit process.

 

Designing Your Audit Process

All the applications your business relies on have different SLA's based on data demands. That's why it's important to audit each application, ideally on a quarterly basis. Your audit should answer the following questions:

• Who will be impacted by an application's downtime?
• How long can this application be unavailable before critical business operations are affected?
• How much storage does this application require?
• How fast is the capacity of this application increasing?
• How much of the data produced by this application is redundant?
• Is our data protected against a disaster?
• Is the data used by this application bound by any governance?

The quarterly schedule for these audits is crucial, because data expansion impacts every application differently. Also, after completing a year's worth of audits, you'll have a solid understanding of applications whose data needs are cyclical. Thanks to your application-based audits, you'll not only know the rate of data expansion for each application, but also be able to identify fluctuations in data storage needs among applications.

Ultimately, your ongoing audit practice will ensure more effective strategic choices as you deploy storage assets across your enterprise.

If you would like further information regarding an assessment audit, please contact your local EMC strategic business partner.