The push for continuous data protection.

IT personnel are more concerned about backup and recovery issues than they were a year ago. Gartner observed in recent reports that the shift from time to backup to time to recovery continues to gain momentum, and that the use of replication and newer disk-based backup solutions will escalate. This type of research continues to bolster the calls for what is seen as the wave of the future: continuous data protection, or CDP. Thanks to innovative replication techniques and the availability of cheaper disk storage, CDP holds the promise that businesses can recover critical data quickly or completely enough to survive a disaster.

Acknowledging that data protection technologies have evolved from simple backups to advanced techniques like mirroring, snap-shots, and remote replication, the Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA) in February 2005 announced the formation of a CDP special interest group. The group hopes to unify the CDP market by developing and promoting standardized terminology to describe the technology, practices, and features of data protection.

Today's regulatory climate 

The growing urgency of backup and recovery issues comes as enterprises are increasingly under regulatory pressure--the governance requirements of Sarbanes-Oxley, the privacy requirements of HIPAA, the homeland defense measures of The USA Patriot Act, the European Data Protection Act, the procedural rules of FDA drug development and testing policies, the new e-commerce laws passed in over 40 countries around the world, not to mention FISMA, GLBA, and NERC.

This regulatory climate requires CIOs to implement policy, process management, monitoring, audit, documentation, and reporting solutions that can ensure accountability, transparency, and compliance. Failure to comply can result in lost business and customer confidence, in addition to financial and legal liability.

Then, of course, there's today's quickly changing cyber threat environment. As the recent Zotob worm demonstrated, the speed at which hackers are able to take advantage of newly disclosed software flaws makes it vital for companies to look beyond patching to broader and more holistic measures for controlling vulnerabilities. The fast-moving Zotob arrived just days after Microsoft patched a hole in the Windows Plug and Play service.

No surprise, then, that storage management software sales totaled $5.6 billion in 2004, a 12.3 percent increase that Gartner and others attributed to the increasing demand placed on corporations by federal compliance rules. (Gartner expects the worldwide storage management software market to grow another 12 percent in 2005, reaching $6.3 billion.)

Balancing security and availability

For today's IT department, the challenge is clearer than ever: support the business goals of the enterprise by ensuring the security and accessibility of its information assets. Anything that disrupts this security and accessibility creates downtime, and downtime costs companies money. And when disruptions do occur, IT departments need to get the enterprise restarted and restored to the "moment before" state as rapidly as possible, without risk of repeating the same failure.

Protecting that valuable information in today's threat environment requires a new approach. The ideal approach, of course, would be to keep information as secure as possible, while also making it available to the users who can maximize its value. Both attributes are needed because information that is available but not secure is suspect, while information that is secure but not available is useless.

Establishing and maintaining the balance between security and availability requires enterprises to understand their environment, act to protect it, and control it on an ongoing basis.

* Understand -- First, enterprises need to understand the state of their information environment. That means assessing the risk against the latest vulnerabilities, exposures, and threats. Early warning systems provide critical information about the external threat environment. Understanding also means knowing what systems are authorized and connected to the network, which applications are deployed, and what personnel are logged on. In addition, enterprises should know whether patches are up-to-date and whether system and data backup procedures are being performed regularly.

* Act -- Once enterprises understand what's happening in their environments, they must protect their information assets while minimizing the risk of disruption. Acting to protect assets involves shielding information from attack, mitigating threats, fixing errors, and recovering from incidents when they happen. Protection technologies such as antivirus, anti-spam, and intrusion-prevention technologies should block threats automatically and be able to receive updates in real-time. Patch management systems are also key so that organizations can rapidly update software at the discovery of a new vulnerability. And it's important to trigger frequent backups when a threat is on the horizon to ensure that systems can be brought back online quickly, minimizing downtime and loss of information.

* Control -- Enterprises must also be able to control their environment. They need to maintain and monitor their infrastructure on an ongoing basis, ensuring that they understand the external threat environment and their internal security posture. In addition, they should have remediation capabilities that automatically distribute software and content updates and patches in response to a threat or vulnerability. It also means having asset management capabilities that help prioritize remediation based on the most critical assets and having selective restore capabilities to allow for timely recovery of critical assets.

No matter how good your network is, data loss and system crashes are inevitable. And no matter what the cause, when vital business information isn't available, every minute down costs you money. According to Infonetics Research, large companies lose up to 16% of their annual revenue due to unplanned network downtime. That's why you need to have a backup and system recovery strategy that gets you back up and running within minutes, not hours or days.

As every IT department knows, the ability to get the enterprise up and running again can be profoundly complicated. Take, for instance, the exponential growth in data volumes. According to a 2004 survey by Horison Information Strategies, a consulting firm that researches the storage market, the amount of corporate data is increasing at an average rate of 50 percent to 70 percent every year.

Maintaining data integrity

A disk-to-disk backup and disaster recovery solution can help enterprises address those challenges without requiring them to rip out the infrastructure they spent significant time and money to implement. With a disk-to-disk backup and disaster recovery solution, users can recover files in the time it takes to browse to them through Windows, and perform bare metal recovery in the time it takes to copy a file from the network. Specifically, the solution can be used for the following tasks:

* Bare metal system recovery -- In the event of system hardware or software failure, or user error, a disk-to-disk solution enables administrators to recover a system much faster than traditional methods. Depending on the amount of data, a server with applications, settings, and data can often be recovered in less time than it would take to reinstall the operating system alone.

* File recovery -- Once an initial image has been created, an administrator can mount the image with a Windows drive letter. File recovery is then just a matter of browsing to the file and using drag and drop to replace it on the working drive. Because the image appears as a typical drive, users can search and sort through the directories using native Windows functionality.

* Change management -- When a new device, application, patch, or hotfix must be applied to a system, a disk-to-disk solution gives an administrator assurance that there will be no unplanned downtime. If problems occur due to the new device or patch, the solution enables a full recovery back to the most recent incremental.

* Database backups -- A disk-to-disk backup and disaster recovery solution enables administrators to put databases that are Microsoft VSS-compliant into a "quiet" state needed for backup without actually taking them offline. It also allows them to back up databases that are not VSS-compliant.

Conclusion

The ongoing explosive growth in data, combined with increased system availability requirements, has resulted in a greater-than-ever strain on IT organizations to provide the necessary data protection in the face of ever-shrinking backup windows. A simplified and automated process for preparing for and recovering all data and system information from a point-in-time backup due to a disaster is key to keeping a business up, running, and growing.

Brian Wistisen is a product manager at Symantec Corporation, Cupertino, CA.

www.symantec.com