The Essentials of Backup Reporting and Management

All over the world, there is a huge increase in data loss and unexpected downtime. At the same time, the majority of businesses do not have a clear plan when it comes to data protection and the restore process. As the IT world changes at the speed of light, it is essential for CIOs to be updated continuously of all the security needs of their companies and to have a crystal clear picture of the whole process of their backup sphere. True understanding will ultimately be more helpful than just spending money on products. Below you will see the essential areas that CIOs must be focused on in order to clearly understand their backup environment.

The Truth is: Backups are Known to FAIL!

Don't let a 98% success rate fool you. Even this somewhat encouraging number can cause a massive amount of work with respect to tracking down backup reports. Most professionals understand that a large percentage of tape restores will fail. Another notable point is that the majority of companies that suffer disaster will go out of business within 3 years times. Just under half of companies will go out of business in a year after critical failure within their IT sphere. These facts are chilling, and make it clear that it can happen to anyone. Backup and recovery systems worldwide are insufficient and ultimately unprepared. This fact can be a confusing reality when various advanced systems for backup get better and better, but it is true that most companies experience backup failures, poor performance, poor use of resources, and are not able to recover data. Policies and data storage needs continue to shift and grow and the infamous "backup problem" has caused even CIOs to stop and admit a need for change.

Tools that provide a comprehensive picture of all aspects of the backup environment are vital to the health and wealth of companies. Though products like this could be confusing and have a high price tag, it would be well worth the investment.

3 Areas Senior Management Care About Most

1. Protection of Data

Primary vs. Secondary Storage

Secondary storage generally holds huge amounts of data. All over the world, people are investing in secondary storage systems. It is amazing to see the vast amount of people buying these units, not to mention the overall capacity of data they are able to hold.

This type of storage that is related to backup is generally tape-based, making the volume much bigger. It has been noted that secondary storage will increase faster than primary storage, and so it is important for businesses to consider how they will continue to keep this data stored over the years. Eventually, the market will require a tool for long-term data storage that automatically meets all the ever-changing needs within the IT world.

Protecting data is a complex task that presents unique challenges for IT departments. The main factors involved in data protection are:

-Mirroring: in the event of the failure of primary disk media.

-Remote Replication: helps business continuity and recovery post disaster.

-Snapshot or Continuous Data Protection: offers quick recovery in the event of a corrupted or deleted file of data.

-Disk-based Backup: helps improve backup and restore performance.

-Tape-based Backup: inexpensive long-term storage of data and offers compliant archiving.

2. How Resources are Being Managed

Staff Management

Most of the data protection market focuses their efforts on what happens in the servers within the data center. However, regardless of policies, employees will always end up storing sensitive data on local drives. Data becomes wide-spread, and is hard to protect. In this same vein, with the addition of mobile device usage, IT departments are challenged regarding management when they don't have control over the endpoint device. It is vital for administrators to have tools which allow successful management of all devices.

Lots of questions are asked within staffing teams such as, are resources being used wisely? Or, are we spending too much in a particular area? These are good questions, and the result is that various companies end up making additional purchases of storage hardware. However, most problems are quite varied, and thus it is vital to have a tool that helps companies understand how resources are being used. By using the right tools, businesses will be able to effectively narrow down problem areas and ultimately save money.

Managing Budgets and Assets

IT chargeback is an effective money-management tool, which helps companies only pay for what they use with respect to backup and network usage. Often times, companies will overspend on storage because they have a lack of information about what they need and what they use on a monthly basis. With the addition of chargeback, this misinformation is eliminated. Specific departments become informed and again, are only charged for their particular usages.

3. Compliance/SLA

As security concerns grow and government mandates change, greater emphasis is placed on data protection and compliance of regulations. There is an undeniable interconnectedness within networks, applications, databases and storage and security technologies. These things exist in a constantly functioning environment, thus creating a challenge with respect to backup window management. Data protection needs are constantly increasing, and so is the need for effective backup management. The problem is, neither area is getting easier, but rather more complex over time. To add to the complexity, regulatory compliance and disaster recovery are areas that have gotten special attention lately, and so fresh alternatives must be developed to effectively manage such factors. Many large businesses must report SLA, or Service Level Agreement compliance. This is a way of reporting daily backup rates, but also may require companies to define backup timeframes, and to ensure no backups are missed within a specified amount of time, among other things.