Section 24.4. What Needs to Be Backed Up?

24.4. What Needs to Be Backed Up?

Just about everything in a corporate environment needs to be backed up. The more important question to ask is what needs to be restored and how quickly does it need to be restored. As discussed in the disaster recovery section, you must define recovery requirements for every piece of data in your company. The primary reason for performing backups is to provide continuous access to a corporation's data in the event the primary copy of data is unavailable. Companies need to back up three types of data:

Intellectual property

This is the information about a company's core competency. In the case of a biotech firm, it is access to data captured in a discovery process; for a market research firm, it is access to database records.

Customer data

Examples range from scanned copies of patient x-rays to market research information and records about the buying patterns of particular market segments. It can also include information that can be used to conduct identity theft, such as a customer's address, birth date, or identification number.

Operational data

This last category includes every other kind of data in the organization. It can include data about where organizations purchase supplies to build products to information about who is responsible for the delivery of products to customers. It includes payroll and accounting information and any other type of information that isn't intellectual property or the personal information of customers.