Data Protection

As previously mentioned, understanding applications and their data protection requirements is a core requirement of contemporary disaster recovery planning. The nature of data ”its volume, frequency of change, use by other critical business processes, its conformance to regulatory and legal mandates governing retention and nonrepudiation ”sets the criteria for the selection of an appropriate data protection strategy.

The case could be made that the data protection strategy is the most important component of disaster recovery planning. Other strategies and logistics created in advance of an outage to cover the replacement of servers, networks, and end- user computing are meaningless if data cannot be recovered and restored to an accessible state. In the final analysis, systems and networks are useless without data.

More and more, organizations define disaster recovery requirements in terms of Time-to-Data, making data recovery synonymous with disaster recovery. Also underscoring the importance of data protection is the rule of thumb within the contingency planning field that, while all other resources and assets (save for personnel) of an organization avail themselves to protection strategies based either on redundancy or replacement, data protection can only be guaranteed through redundancy.