Tips and Strategies for Data Protection Within Organizations
Protecting critical data within an organization involves creating a plan similar to a data recovery plan. When you create a plan for protecting data within an organization there are a few things that have to be taken into consideration, as well as a few strategies that should be deployed to carry out data protection.
Tips and Strategies for Data Protection
When considering a plan for data protection you should analyze all of the data within the organization by type, age, creation and modifications, history of data growth, the largest files, and number of users, duplicate data, and other related information. Once you have analyzed all of the data you can proceed to do the following:
- Determine Critical Data: Determine the importance of data and divide it into categories which include very critical, critical, inactive, and duplicate data. Obviously very critical data has the highest priority and duplicate data the lowest priority. Very critical data will require frequent backups and replication in the event of data loss, critical data should be backed up on a daily basis, inactive data should be retained for different compliancy reasons, and duplicate data can be deleted.
- Data Access: Once the data is categorized and separated it is necessary to ensure that the end users have access to the data. Very critical and critical data is stored on a main server where inactive data goes into secondary storage. The end users should be able to access the very critical and critical data as well as the inactive data that has been archived in the event of compliancy requests and other regulations.
- Recovery Testing: Once you have a data recovery plan in place, it is important to test the recovery system on a periodic basis to ensure the organization can recover within a reasonable amount of time. When testing the recovery system, it is necessary to do a comprehensive test that reaches all the way to the application level. This is known as end-to-end testing which tests everything from client server and Web-based multi level applications to components that reside on more than one server. Since all of these components are related and dependent upon one another, the end-to-end testing decreases the likelihood of problems occurring.
- Data Management: Most organizations do what is called an SRM (Service Resource Module) audit which monitors data categorization and data retention policies that are implemented within the data infrastructure. The audits help an organization to determine if the existing policies help to improve server and storage performance or hinder it. It also helps to determine the rate of improvement of data recovery speeds and reduced backup needs while at the same time decreasing overall costs of maintaining data management. Any company should consider cloud security; this will help keep important documents encrypted to people who are not allowed to view them.
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