Posted on Wed, Aug 12, 2009
Over the past decade, the world has gotten more electronically connected in a multitude of ways. Whether while traveling, in the office or at home - most people are never far away from an electronic medium that holds the capability of linking people to each other nearby or halfway around the world. The complexities of daily business have made instant access to electronic data more and more crucial, and increased the need to put effective data loss protection measures and potential disaster recovery solutions in place.
Take global alliances for instance: many companies have international offices, outsourced managed service providers and offshore development offices that each exponentially increase the chances for data loss. Communication practices as simple as sending e-mails can compromise confidential information that instantaneously travel across the world. Overall, the environment is ripe with opportunity for data loss.
Today's workers experience a far greater amount of flexibility in their work location and hours than those of previous generations. A May 2006 U.S. Chamber of Commerce report stated that 20 million Americans telecommute. This indicates that electronic communications have become the lifeline to the office, with important and perhaps sensitive company data transmitted back and forth throughout cyberspace. This is a prime target for hackers and criminals to hijack.
Throughout the years, organizations have spent an immense amount of resources on data protection for the purpose of safeguarding their mission-critical information. However, the bulk of their efforts have been centered on preventing outsiders from hacking into the organization. Ironically, studies have shown that the majority of information leaks are resultant from data loss inflicted by employees and company partners. There is some research which shows that more than half and as much as 80% of data breaches are caused by company insiders. A business does not need vastly dispersed offices or a staff which heavily telecommutes to be fertile ground for data loss. Employees can cause a data loss disaster for their company with the simple click of a mouse - whether done purposefully or accidentally.
Posted on Thu, Jun 25, 2009
The second part of the two-part series on “Green IT” for disaster
recovery focuses on data deduplication.
In going green, deduplication provides the capabilities to address
power, cooling and space consumption challenges by optimizing disk capacity and
storing more data with less space.
Reducing the space utilization in a disk-to-disk backup system increases
power efficiency and decreases cooling costs.
Data Deduplication
Data deduplication compares segments of data being written to disk
storage with previously stored data segments and removes all unnecessary
duplicate files. It is a data reduction
technique that makes storage more efficient and dramatically reduces expenses
for the entire IT infrastructure.
Key
Benefits of Data Deduplication
Save
Power and Cooling Costs. Tapes stack up over time,
requiring more storage space. Deduplication reduces the overall footprint by using less storage with
the exact same amount of information.
Increase Retention Capacity with
Less Waste. Deduplication’s
elimination of unnecessary files allows the ability to store critical business
and regulatory files for a long-term, at a fraction of the space within the
datacenter.
Improve Disaster Recovery (DR). There is less bandwidth needed to
replicate data. Also, if you send less,
you store less on the other side; which relates to storages costs, as well as
power and cooling of the DR location.
Lessen
CO2 Emissions. Trucks are not required to ship
bulky tapes offsite. Therefore, there
is no gasoline being used to transport disks to an offsite location.
An
offsite data backup company with innovative deduplication and virtualization
technologies allows increased IT flexibility and frees up datacenters from the
shortcomings of a static, physical IT infrastructure. Choosing a reliable and efficient remote
backup service provider makes “greening” the IT organization simple and
efficient.