How to protect your treasured data in cloud computing era in China I

In this cloud computing era in China, companies large or small generate and manage large amount of data. Some data could be essentially important to their survival and continued prosperity, which also means, loss of data could result in loss of customers and revenue. This article focuses on backup, part of disaster recovery plan and an effective way to minimize potential data loss.

Data you cannot afford to lose

Nowadays in China, companies’ operation is closely related to data storage and management. Servers and data centers store and process large amount of data every second. Loss of system resources or data, which may happen from time to time due to any failure. A failure may be caused by small equipment problems or large-scale natural disasters such as earthquakes, fires, flood and typhoon or other unexpected incidents. causes of data loss

Business continuity planning (BCP)

Companies develop business continuity plans to minimize any event that might negatively impact operations. A business continuity plan (BCP) is a plan to help ensure that business processes can continue during a time of emergency or disaster, which usually includes a range of disaster scenarios and the steps that a company or organization should take in those particular scenarios to resume normal operation. To establish a BCP, impact analysis, business impact analysis (BIA), threat and risk analysis (TRA) and impact scenarios should first be considered. In this process, it is important to determine critical functions and assign the following two values:

Recovery point objective (RPO) – the acceptable latency of data that will not be recovered. For example, is it acceptable for the company to lose 3 days of data?

Recovery time objective (RTO) – the acceptable amount of time to restore the function.

A business continuity plan is often closely related to Disaster Recovery Plan (DRP), a method that a business takes to resume access to their data, software, hardware to recover the normal performance of the critical functions after a disaster strikes.

Data backup

Data backup can be deemed as a simple form of disaster recovery plans and is an efficient and economical way for businesses to recover their data after a disaster. Actually, backup can be deemed as part of the foundation of any disaster recovery plan.

The backup process is the copying into an archive file of data in case it might be used to recover the original in the event of data loss. Companies can choose a most suitable data storage medium according to their particular set of circumstances, for example, magnetic tape, hard disk, recordable CDs, DVDs, fresh memory, as well as remote backup and cloud backup services. And there are also various data repository models to choose from. backup types and desp.

Regularly, backup involves the following steps:

Create regular backups

Test that the backups can be used restore a working system

Keep the backup data off-site, away from the data center so that a localized disaster such as earthquake does not destroy both the storage devices and the backups of those devices

As new data are always being generated, backups will need to be carried out frequently. The scale might differ in every specific situation, but those responsible for backups should check how successful the backups are as in case of a disaster, those will be of great significance to a business' operation.