Chapter 1. Introduction to Data Protection

In This Chapter:

• What Does Data Protection Mean?

• A Model for Information, Data, and Storage

• Why Is Data Protection Important to the Enterprise?

• Data Loss and Business Risk

• Connectivity: The Risk Multiplier

• Business Continuity: The Importance of Data Availability to Business Operations

• The Changing Face of Data Protection

• Key Points

The explosion of corporate data in the 1990s, coupled with new data storage technology such as networked storage, has made the accumulation and management of large amounts of data a corporate priority. Corporations try to accumulate terabytes of data on increasingly large storage systems. Gathering customer data, vendor information, minute financial measurements, product data, retail sell-through data, and manufacturing metrics are now corporate goals. Even small to medium-size businesses (SMB) have begun to acquire terabytes of data. Management of storage systems, and the data held within them, is a cause of great concern within IT departments, corporate legal offices, and the executive suite.

With the advent of new regulations and the understanding of how incredibly valuable corporate data is, there is a new focus on protecting and accessing data. As companies received hard-earned lessons on what can happen when data is destroyed, damaged, or unavailable, more focus has been placed on protecting mission-critical information than on simply accumulating it.

Typically, IT departments have tried to protect data by using high availability (HA) devices with redundant systems, backing up data regularly to tape, and data duplication techniques. Increasingly, more sophisticated methods of ensuring the integrity and availability of important corporate data are being used, including remote mirroring and remote copy, near-line backup, Data Lifecycle Management (DLM), and Information Lifecycle Management (ILM).