Chapter 24. It s All About Data Protection

Chapter 24. It's All About Data Protection

The chapters that have preceded talk about nothing but backup and recovery, but it's important to give you a little context before I close out the book. While backup and recovery are extremely important, they are but one part of the data protection landscape. Data protection is defined as all activities involved in protecting data from the various things that could happen to it. Data protection activities include backup, recovery, archive, storage security, and disaster recovery, and every company should be aware of all of these activities regardless of its size. While smaller companies may be less subject to some aspects of data protection, such as long-term archiving or compliance issues, they should regularly evaluate each aspect of data protection to determine how much it applies to themand what they're doing about it. This is why this book, which focuses on backup and recovery, ends with a chapter on data protectionto make sure that you know that backup and recovery is just the beginning of your job.

Perhaps your company's archive and storage security requirements are easy to meet, allowing you to fulfill the rest of your company's data protection requirements with an open-source backup system and a simple off-site tape rotation scheme. Perhaps you've got sophisticated archive or storage security needs, and you're considering implementing an open-source backup and recovery system to leave room in the budget for some of the commercial solutions that address those other elements of data protection. Finally, it's also possible that you hadn't considered archiving or storage security prior to reading this chapter. Whichever description best fits you, I hope this overview of data protection gives you some food for thought.

We live in the information age. Even the smallest "mom-and-pop" businesses rely on some type of computer systems to store the information they generate. Perhaps it's a list of customer phone numbers, a log of business transactions, or even details about a new product. Whatever the information is, the business would be damaged if it was lost, deleted, destroyed, misplaced, or stolen. Therefore, a complete data protection system protects against all these risks.

A data protection system doesn't justrestore data that has been destroyed or damaged. It also helps retrieve data that has been moved or retrieves data that is being requested in a manner different from the way it was stored. It prevents data from falling into the wrong hands and ensures companies are in compliance with regulations affecting their industries. And, of course, a complete data protection system ensures that the data can be restored in times of disaster.

There are both business and technical reasons for data protection. The next two sections provide an overview of those reasons.