Is your company's data really available?

Data availability is the degree that data is available for use in your organization. The lack of it can cause tremendous problems as critical functions in your company screech to a halt. A wide variety of techniques exist to increase the likelihood of your company's data remaining available. Protecting and making available your company's data should be a top priority of every organization.

Most computing system failures continue to be due to an age-old cause: human error. A smaller amount of data loss is due to malfunctions in computer hardware, software or power failures. Recent developments that have made protecting your data harder have included hackers' intentional efforts to destroy or corrupt data, thieves' efforts to steal your data, and terrorists' efforts to disrupt data delivery systems.

Weather elements and natural disasters continue to put the destruction of computer systems on the front page every year.

For these and other reasons, IT executives must anticipate the loss of computers and data and build contingency plans to deal with them. Clearly, it's suicide today for any business to ignore the issue of data protection and availability.

Recent years have seen a growing awareness for the need to be prepared for a wide variety of disasters, ranging from sabotage or flood to fire, earthquake or hurricanes. This has engendered the duel planning efforts of Disaster Preparedness (being ready for a disaster) and Disaster Recovery (how to recover from a disasterous loss of computing resources). These plans are two critical elements of the IT department's survival strategy today. No one gets through a visit from the IT auditors any longer without a careful review of the DRP (Disaster Recovery Plan) that contains these critical plans.

One measure of data availability is how fast an IT system can recover from a total systems failure where the entire computer system powers down. Recovery ranges from finding and installing backup tapes, to the automated switch to a second set of computers with an identical set of data. The significance of the difference is brought home by the example of an order entry department that gets hit by their main computer going down. If the only protection is to make nightly backup tapes, they are hours from being ready to be backup taking customer orders over the phone..... hours that cost not only new orders but the permanent lost of customers who go elsewhere and are happy with their newfound supplier. At the other end of the data availability spectrum, the order entry workers would experience a brief blank screen, and then see once again the screen that they were building with the customer on the telephone line.

Which method of data protection would you prefer? The latter seems a lead-pipe cinch until costs are considered. It's an incontrovertible fact that the faster you want to be able to resort from a computer outage, the costlier it gets and the curve is geometric, not a straight line.

High Availability, High Systems Availability and other names like Continuous Availability describe the various technical solutions devised to keep data available for longer continuous periods of operation during the unexpected or planned downtime for the primary computer. These levels of data availability will become a must-have for many successful businesses in the future.

Some industries that maintain continuous operation, (hospitals, police, governments, steel mills, refineries, process manufacturing) must have access to data on a uninterrupted basis. Other organizations without such a drastic need for continuous system uptime still have a need for greater certainty that their business information systems stay up and running with minimal acceptable delays. If their information systems are able to continue even in a partial manner, they are less likely to loose a customer to a competitor--a customer that would not be likely to return.

In the 21st century and beyond, data availability will become a major issue as applications that are data-centric become the rule. During this time, the era of protecting data through frequent backups to magnetic tape or other media that is removed to a remote storage area will diminish, being replaced by new data protection strategies.

Terry Boulais is Director of Business Development for Key Information Systems. Key offers its Backup & Recovery Managed Services to select, manage and operate data protection and availability strategies. More information can be found by contacting the author at [e-mail].