Disaster recovery or disaster prevention?

This week there is a conference in Tampa about preventing a catastrophic loss of data. Although the conference’s focus is based on FEMA types of events, every enterprise needs to be aware of the costs of lost data.

Companies in this market niche break down the possibility of disaster and the recovery of data into as many facets as there are in a prism. The daily concerns of data deliverability to your customer or clients desktops and the security of the data so data does not end up on your competitors desktop breaks down into a few specific areas.

Network security and vulnerability – Can your users access data easily while preventing unauthorized viewers from seeing your data?

Data tape storage vulnerability- Is your off site tape vault secure or are there vulnerabilities to tape loss and theft in the process.

End of Life of Disk and subsystems – How does your company dispose of disks at the end of life or end of lease of your storage subsystems? Some of our customers keep all of their disks at the end of lease but this is very costly, but many are uncertain as to how to clean disks before returning them or disposing them.

At Zerowait we are recognized for providing High Availability networking services & storage services to our customers, so many of our customers have adopted our thoughts on disaster prevention instead of disaster recovery. Using a combination load balancing switches, VPN’s and data mirroring we keep our data in two separate locations, and many of our customers do the same thing now. It really does not cost any more than implementing a D/R site and strategy, and the advantages during data migrations and network changes are numerous. But a Secure VPN between multiple locations introduces a whole new set of issues about virtual site location security.

Some of our customers have been the targets of the tape loss scandals that have recently been covered in the media and it should come as no surprise that these losses occur, in a competitive environment the low cost provider will win some business, but to lower their costs they must forgo some security. You get what you pay for. Implementing a Disaster prevention site strategy could have prevented these data loss stories from hitting the media.

Recently many customers been asking us to help them clean their disks. When using a subsystem like NetApp there are a whole bunch of challenges to doing this. And this has become a growing part of our business. But at the lowest common denominator you want to be certain that there is no visible proprietary data on your disks when you are done with them.

I hope to cover some of this during my time on the panel discussion at the conference, and I hope to see you there.