storage and backup
Companies must account and deal for new
legislation governing how information is stored on IT systems.
The EU is shortly to adopt
many of the recommendations
on corporate governance set out by the Sarbanes-Oxley Act in the US,
UK firms are to be expected to deal with
and manage explicit guidelines on
how to store email and other documents on their IT systems.
IT managers should consider the necessary procedures
and technologies needed for compliance now,
in order ensure technology is able to deal with the new legislation.
Regulations regarding data storage at the moment are fairly lax,
but there will be a huge increase
in the amount of data than must be held over
the next 18 months to two years.
Email archiving,
storage and backup
the increased use of expensive
write-once read-many media,
information lifecycle management and content-aware storage
as a few of the technologies which firms should consider for the future,
though in some cases companies
will simply need to improve the way
they manage existing systems.
It is anticipated that new legislations
will demand that an organizations’
archiving solutions must guarantee that the information
they hold has not been changed,
and keep it for a specific
period of time before automatically deleting it.
A survey of 493 companies in the UK has shown
that compliance with regulations has a high or fairly significant
impact on the data storage strategies of 87% of the organizations surveyed.
Back-up and recovery was also very important to the data
protection strategy of 93% of organizations.
78% of organizations future storage strategy
s set to include Disk-to-Disk-to-Tape technology.
This may be due
to the highly affordable
and flexible nature of this new technology.
For example,
recent deployments
of disk-to-disk-to-tape (D2D2T)
solutions by various companies have, on average, reduced the backup
window by
more than 70%, from
storage and backup
fifteen hours to less than four,
yielding significant time and cost savings in tape management.
Interestingly,
product features were far more important than the brand of the product,
with 82% of organizations making a decision based on product features.
When it came to the decision of choosing
a specialist storage supplier or a general IT provider
for storage solutions there was a very slight preference for specialized storage suppliers (51%) over general IT providers (49%).
This survey shows that compliance with regulations
is a key driver in companies’ storage security policy and that
we are likely to see more companies deploying Disk to Disk to Tape technology in the future.
All the above is fine if you are a corporate,
you have an annual IT
budget of £500,000 and numerous members
of staff who can plan and complete such a system. Is it very easy to talk about SANs, NAS’s Virtual Tape Libraries. Organizations of this nature already
have a very stable and flexible infrastructure,
where it is comparably easier to implement such a system.
What about the 1000’s of smaller
companies such as solicitors,
accountants,
medical practices and manufactures etc.
which may have only 2 servers on site,
but still have the same reliance on data
and have to adhere to the same legislations?
Backup to tape is an option,
however,
there is an upfront cost
and a requirement for a trusted member
of staff to take the tapes off site every night and store in a safe place.
Can you guarantee your backup has worked, and do you really trust your long term data on magnetic media? Another option is to archive your
data onto optical devices,
however the cost is even more prohibitive
than tape and you still need to take the disk offsite.
No doubt your data is growing quickly;
recently enforced legislations makes sure of this,
so why not employ a backup
and archival solution which has no upfront cost,
is fully automated,
secure and regardless of disaster
will ensure your data is always available,
Offsite Backup.
