{"id":5496,"date":"2015-03-30T18:03:38","date_gmt":"2015-03-30T08:03:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/nsrd.info\/blog\/?p=5496"},"modified":"2015-03-30T18:03:56","modified_gmt":"2015-03-30T08:03:56","slug":"world-backup-day-misses-the-point","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/nsrd.info\/blog\/2015\/03\/30\/world-backup-day-misses-the-point\/","title":{"rendered":"World backup day misses the point"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"iStock<\/a><\/p>\n

It’s fair to say I’m a big fan of backup and recovery. So much so that\u00a0a substantial part of the last 19 years of my career have been devoted to it in some form or another.<\/p>\n

Yet\u00a0here’s the rub:\u00a0World backup day (March 31) is full of good intentions but\u00a0has entirely the wrong focus. By that I don’t just mean it should be World Recovery<\/i> Day (although that would be a nice change); instead, it places emphasis on just one aspect of data protection, and these days there’s no such thing as a data protection strategy that\u00a0only<\/em> leverages a single aspect.<\/p>\n

Data protection \u2013 Information\u00a0Lifecycle<\/em>\u00a0Protection (ILP), as I like to think of it starts well before the first backup is taken, and extends into a variety of fields: storage, operating systems and virtualisation. You might say at bare minimum, ILP\u00a0is comprised of the following:<\/p>\n

\"Components<\/a>
Components of ILP<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

(It’s also impossible to have a truly effective Information Lifecycle Protection strategy without also having a data lifecycle management strategy<\/a> \u2013 i.e., be comfortable with archival and pruning of data.)<\/p>\n

It would be easy to look at the above diagram and assume it’s all about storage, but there’s more to it than that. Smart companies are starting to focus on their data protection in an\u00a0application-centric<\/em> approach. That’s not to suggest decentralisation of data protection, but more decentralised\u00a0integration<\/em> with intelligent centralised reporting, capacity management\u00a0and policy management.\u00a0For sure, storage is one aspect of\u00a0what we need to protect, but if you look at an average enterprise now there are whole realms of data protection functions that have made their way up into higher layers \u2013 VMware’s\u00a0SRM, vMotion, etc., are perfect examples of data-protection concepts applied at a higher level to provide more functional protection.<\/p>\n

By application-centric approach, I’m not talking about\u00a0“MSSQL Initiated” or “Oracle Initiated” (though I’ll admit that plays a part in a\u00a0centralised policy\/decentralised integration approach), but more a consideration of how enterprise IT needs to work in an evolving \u2013 indeed,\u00a0evolved<\/em>\u00a0\u2013 landscape. It’s time in IT we stop thinking about backup and recovery or data protection being about a list of hosts and databases that need protection,\u00a0and instead think about data protection in terms of business functions,\u00a0business\u00a0applications<\/em> that need to be protected. From the business perspective the hosts\u00a0cyclops<\/em>,\u00a0medusa<\/em> and\u00a0cerberus<\/em> running the database\u00a0fipr00<\/em> is meaningless – the business wants to know that the\u00a0financial planning\u00a0<\/em>system\u00a0is being protected. As\u00a0cloud based approaches to IT take hold and\u00a0introduce a consumer-based, service-centric\u00a0view of IT, IT must adjust to think of data protection from a service, application or business function\u00a0perspective.<\/p>\n

Celebrate world backup day by all means, but let’s keep in mind it’s at\u00a0just one quadrant in the information lifecycle protection approach.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It’s fair to say I’m a big fan of backup and recovery. So much so that\u00a0a substantial part of the…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[5],"tags":[282,1115],"class_list":["post-5496","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-backup-theory","tag-data-protection","tag-world-backup-day"],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pKpIN-1qE","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/nsrd.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5496","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/nsrd.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/nsrd.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nsrd.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nsrd.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5496"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/nsrd.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5496\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5503,"href":"https:\/\/nsrd.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5496\/revisions\/5503"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/nsrd.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5496"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nsrd.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5496"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nsrd.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5496"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}