Enterprise Systems Backup and Recovery: A Corporate Insurance Policy

September 30, 2008, Auerbach Publications, ISBN 9781420076394

The success of information backup systems does not rest on IT administrators alone. Rather, a well-designed backup system comes about only when several key factors coalesce—business involvement, IT acceptance, best practice designs, enterprise software, and reliable hardware. Enterprise Systems Backup and Recovery: A Corporate Insurance Policy provides organizations with a comprehensive understanding of the principles and features involved in effective enterprise backups.

Instead of focusing on any individual backup product, this book recommends corporate procedures and policies that need to be established for comprehensive data protection. It provides relevant information to any organization, regardless of which operating systems or applications are deployed, what backup system is in place, or what planning has been done for business continuity. It explains how backup must be included in every phase of system planning, development, operation, and maintenance. It also provides techniques for analyzing and improving current backup system performance.

After reviewing the concepts in this book, organizations will be able to answer these questions with respect to their enterprise:

• What features and functionality should be expected in a backup environment?
• What terminology and concepts are unique to backup software, and what can be related to other areas?
• How can a backup system be monitored successfully?
• How can the performance of a backup system be improved?
• What features are just "window dressing" and should be ignored, as opposed to those features that are relevant?

Backup and recovery systems touch on just about every system in an organization. Properly implemented, they can provide an enterprise with greater assurance that its information is safe. By utilizing the information in this book, organizations can take a greater step toward improving the security of their data and preventing the devastating loss of data and business revenue that can occur with poorly constructed or inefficient systems.

Data Protection: Ensuring Data Availability (First Edition)

February 22, 2017, Auerbach Publications, ISBN 9781482244151

This is the fundamental truth about data protection: backup is dead.

Or rather, backup and recovery, as a standalone topic, no longer has relevance in IT. As a standalone topic, it’s been killed off by seemingly exponential growth in storage and data, by the cloud, and by virtualization.

So what is data protection?

This book takes a holistic, business-based approach to data protection. It explains how data protection is a mix of proactive and reactive planning, technology and activities that allow for data continuity. It shows how truly effective data protection comes from a holistic approach considering the entire data lifecycle and all required SLAs. Data protection is neither RAID nor is it continuous availability, replication, snapshots or backups―it is all of them, combined in a considered and measured approach to suit the criticality of the data and meet all the requirements of the business.

The book also discusses how businesses seeking to creatively leverage their IT investments and to drive through cost optimization are increasingly looking at data protection as a mechanism to achieve those goals. In addition to being a type of insurance policy, data protection is becoming an enabler for new processes around data movement and data processing.

This book arms readers with information critical for making decisions on how data can be protected against loss in the cloud, on-premises, or in a mix of the two. It explains the changing face of recovery in a highly virtualized data center and techniques for dealing with big data. Moreover, it presents a model for where data recovery processes can be integrated with IT governance and management in order to achieve the right focus on recoverability across the business.

Protecting Information Assets and IT Infrastructure in the Cloud

May 8, 2019, Auerbach Publications, ISBN 9781138393325

Co-authored with Ravi Das

Today, many businesses and corporations are moving their on premises IT Infrastructure to the Cloud. There are numerous advantages to do doing so, including on-demand service, scalability, and fixed pricing. As a result, the Cloud has become a popular target of cyber-based attacks. Although an ISP is often charged with keeping virtual infrastructure secure, it is not safe to assume this. Back-up measures must be taken. This book explains how to guard against cyber-attacks by adding another layer of protection to the most valuable data in the Cloud: customer information and trade secrets.

Data Protection: Ensuring Data Availability (Second Edition)

May 11, 2020, Auerbach Publications, ISBN 9780367256777

The second edition of Data Protection goes beyond the traditional topics including deduplication, continuous availability, snapshots, replication, backup, and recovery, and explores such additional considerations as legal, privacy, and ethical issues. A new model is presented for understanding and planning the various aspects of data protection, which is essential to developing holistic strategies. The second edition also addresses the cloud and the growing adoption of software and function as a service, as well as effectively planning over the lifespan of a workload: what the best mix of traditional and cloud native data protection services might be. Virtualization continues to present new challenges to data protection, and the impact of containerization is examined.

The book takes a holistic, business-based approach to data protection. It explains how data protection is a mix of proactive and reactive planning, technology, and activities that allow for data continuity. There are three essential activities that refer to themselves as data protection; while they all overlap in terms of scope and function, each operates as a reasonably self-contained field with its own specialists and domain nomenclature. These three activities are:

• Data protection as a storage and recovery activity
• Data protection as a security activity
• Data protection as a privacy activity

These activities are covered in detail, with a focus on how organizations can use them to leverage their IT investments and optimize costs. The book also explains how data protection is becoming an enabler for new processes around data movement and data processing.

This book arms readers with information critical for making decisions on how data can be protected against loss in the cloud, on premises, or in a mix of the two. It explains the changing face of recovery in a highly virtualized datacenter and techniques for dealing with big data. Moreover, it presents a model for where data recovery processes can be integrated with IT governance and management in order to achieve the right focus on recoverability across the business.