The Situation...
“Can Praveen find the right data security solution to handle all complexities?”

Amit Goel, Senior IT Manager of a manufacturing company, while taking stock of the entire IT infrastructure, particularly to check if the organisation’s s sensitive data was secure and protected, noticed several loopholes. The challenge grew multi-fold given the company’s expansion and business growth. Goel then received a call from his top bosses for a business review meeting. His priority at that moment was to work out a data centre investment plan and provide economic justification for investment in a data protection program with an efficient backup.

The obvious question during the review meeting was with regard to his strategy for this. Besides consolidation, Goel’s challenge was to ensure intelligent backup, recovery, business continuity and disaster recovery plan, which could result in reduction in complexity, besides controlled costs.

As the data centre added more servers, increased number of network devices, more applications with business critical functionality, the management of the information storage became more complex. It also resulted in unmanageable security threats.

The primary task for Goel is to find ways to simplify data storage, make it secure, manageable, increase user accessibility, and address changing business needs. Goel has to find the right solutions to address these challenges. His task is to do more with less, improve RTO\RPO for data business assets, ensure tamper-proof access to critical data, handle data deluge and protect against data losses and disasters. Besides, complexity around deployment, backup and restore policies are a challenge.

Goel intends looking at data backup protection tools. However, the challenges do not end here. He also has to choose appropriate backup tools, which revolved around tape automation solutions and drivers, disk backup, disk media, etc.

The big question for Goel is to spot the right storage solutions, which do not disrupt the existing framework, but ease data management and can absorb future data growth.

The Big Questions

Can Goel find a data storage backup and recovery solution which is cost-effective, consolidated and which will increase efficiency? What kind of functionalities does he need to address his requirements?

What kind of business benefits can Goel expect by deploying data storage protection tools? What would be the RoI and cost reductions? What budget does he need to allocate for investment?

"SOLUTION WILL DEPEND ON NEED"

By GS Ravi Kumar, CIO, Gati Ltd

About me: I implemented various technological innovations within the company in the logistics space. Recipient of several awards in the CIO space for pioneering technological deployments, which triggered the business growth

Can Goel find a data storage backup and recovery solution which is cost-effective, consolidated and which will increase efficiency? What kind of functionalities does he need to address his requirements?

Goel has a wide choice, as there are enough data storage backup and recovery solutions and technologies available from across offerings.

However, the first criterion for choosing the right backup tool, is to do some amount of groundwork. They are as follows:

1.    List the various Data/Applications in the company
2.    Classify data in terms of criticality (as a tiered approach)
3.    Specify the RTO/RPO against each of the stored data
4.    Size of the data has to be identified both, current data and future data, expected to grow in the next three years
5.    List the different storages and technologies currently being used
6.    Retention and archival policy for each data This kind of planning will provide insights into the type of functionality that is required in the backup and recovery solution. For instance, you can ffind out that if a multi-location, high-availability solution is required, or snapshots are required, then at what frequency, or whether tape is sufficient for it. In most cases, it will be a mixture of different solutions, based on the criticality and sensitivity of different data/applications. In such cases, it is best to identify a product/solution, which can cater to different requirements across multiple platforms. Goel can also consider functionality like data de-duplication, compression, encryption, fully automated and single window administration. However, the time required for rolling out a full-fledged backup and recovery solution will directly depend on the number of applications/data available, the complexity, the size of data and the platforms that exist.

What kind of business benefits can Goel expect by deploying data storage protection tools? What would be the RoI and cost reductions? What budget does he need to allocate for investment?

Using data protection tools will definitely fetch several business benefits to Goel and his team. They include:

a) Business Continuity
b) Information Availability (based on the SLAs)
c)  Compliance with various regulations and standards
d) Storage space reductions (de-duplication) The amount you need to invest is much like working out your life insurance needs. It depends on the perceived value of life and your premium-paying capacity. Similarly, the higher the need for data availability and business continuity, the more the investment.

The RoI is directly related to the data availability and business continuity requirement.

"RETRIEVING DATA IN REAL TIME"

By Pertisth Mankotia, Head – IT, Sheela Foam Pvt Ltd

About me: Developed and implemented home grown ERP ‘Great Plus’. Responsible for the digitisation of the enterprise. Been with the Group (Sleepwell) since 1995

Can Goel find a data storage backup and recovery solution which is cost-effective, consolidated and which will increase efficiency? What kind of functionalities does he need to address his requirements?

Before zeroing in on any data protection tool, Goel needs to evaluate tools, which can store data as a DR and has load balancing capabilities, besides other functionalities. The criteria would be to see if the solution has the capability to retrieve data in real time.

Besides, he should have archival plan in place, which could be around virtual backup, given the fact that it is a manufacturing company. Tape library could be one of the solutions, but tape is expensive. Around two terabyte of tape library would cost approx Rs 8,000. SAN Boxes and online data storage are recommended.

A well-worked-out tiered approach is necessary to segregate the data and classify it based on its importance. Most companies still use tape libraries or digital libraries, besides the online and virtual backups as all three are important.


What kind of business benefits can Goel expect by deploying data storage protection tools? What would be the RoI and cost reductions? What budget does he need to allocate for investment?

For Goel, to reap the benefits of investments that he makes into data protection tools, a robust security roadmap is critical. This would determine if the data is secure, while a well-worked-out DR plan will ensure that at no point data is at risk. The team needs to taken into account the applications that are not needed and rarely accessed, and those that are to be stored in disks. The RoI in this case is not around what kind of tools one has deployed, but what kind of credibility the IT team has built in securing data.

Some tangible benefits would be visible once the data is well protected online and balances the load properly. It is like an insurance policy and the intangible benefits are umpteen. On te negative side, not having an appropriate backup or recovery tool would result in huge financial losses, which would take years for the organisation to come out of. Since the manufacturing company will be dealing with customer and dealer data, they should tier it accordingly and see the benefits of providing information in real time.