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The Impact of Downtime and Data Loss
How much downtime can your business tolerate? This is a number you should know by now. Minimizing downtime can be complex and consumes much of the day-to-day efforts of a typical IT staff. Unplanned downtime is caused by people errors, software failures, and hardware failures, many of which are now recoverable, network failures, a growing variety of natural disasters including power and electrical outages, and intrusion -- primarily from the widespread use of Internet applications. The IT industry has made significant strides in reducing the impact on an IT infrastructure from hardware failure by providing enhancements such as RAID, clustering, a variety of replication capabilities, and many built-in redundancy features. The increasing possibility of a natural disasters requires more careful development of contingency plans while energy/electricity outages, either unplanned or scheduled, require expensive alternative power sources and often involve geographically redundant locations.
While technology has become significantly more reliable in protecting against device and component failures, intrusion has become a bigger threat. Valuable data faces even higher risks from data-destructive worms, viruses, spyware (data theft), identity theft, credit card scams and unwanted spam as the growing wave of Internet-terrorists worldwide steadily grows. Malicious attacks on a corporate system or network where the intruder is someone who has been entrusted with authorized access to the network, and also may have knowledge of the network architecture, are on the rise. An internal intrusion detection system (IDS) system is one measure that can help organizations limit the risk from insider attacks and should warrant serious consideration.
Recovery from an intrusion is difficult and data loss frequently results unless special complex procedures are implemented. Finding the sources of intrusions can very time consuming and difficult, if not impossible, causing significant downtime. In reality there is no silver bullet in place as of yet to implement a bullet-proof and secure IT infrastructure.
Bottom line: An effective data protection strategy using the best-in-class solutions available will minimize the types of down-time and data loss. All of these disruptions can be mitigated given enough financial resources. Moving to some type of high availability storage architecture is becoming a mandatory strategy as the march to six 9s availability is under way in the face of increasing exposures. End-users should thoroughly understand the vendor's offerings for data protection while quantifying what the cost of IT downtime means to their business.
Source: Horison Information Strategies: Storage Spectrum
© 2009 Horison
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