There is no silver bullet to disaster recovery, says Jack Bailey, engineering manager at cloud computing provider iland.
“When outage horror stories take over headlines, executives tend to have kneejerk reactions and look to adopt whatever disaster recovery offering they can implement fastest,” he says. “But every organization and location is unique, and failing to thoroughly assess your situation may lead you to adopt a solution that is expensive overkill or cheap and inadequate.”
And while most IT executives and data management experts acknowledge that there isn’t one failsafe solution to protecting and recovering data, they agree that there are certain steps organizations should take.
What are the necessary precautions companies should take to protect critical files and applications in the event of disaster? Dozens of data storage, data management and disaster recovery experts share their advice. Here are their top 12 suggestions regarding how to disaster-proof data (files and applications).
1. Conduct a data assessment. “Know your high-value data assets — where your customer information and other sensitive data live, which files are heavily used, who is using them and which departments they align with,” says David Gibson, vice president, Varonis, a provider of comprehensive data governance software. “With usage intelligence and data classification, you can better prioritize what data you need to have on hand after a disaster and who will need to have access to it.”
