Why is data protection important?

Data is the backbone of every organization. Whatever business you are in, enormous amounts of data are needed every day to keep it running. If you also consider that data volumes are increasing by 80 percent a year, it is clear that it must be protected against a variety of threats.

What is more, it is no longer only large enterprises that require sophisticated data protection strategies. Small and medium-sized businesses have increasingly tough demands as well.

Most businesses may have considered the impact of data loss - but few have the right strategy and technology to ensure minimum impact. The reality is that businesses rely on data-rich application software, information and communications for their success. For this reason, data protection should be part of an overall business strategy rather than just a desirable feature.

What would happen if the data on your systems was wiped out by a power surge or system failure? What if a fire or flood destroyed your electronic or paper-based records? Would you be able to recover all of your information? And what if a crucial manual backup had been forgotten? Would you know which customers to invoice and how much? Could you pay your bills? Could your business continue to run?

Given the importance of information and the potential high cost associated with data loss, reliable data protection is no longer an option. It is an obligation. Whether you need to capture, distribute and protect data automatically, or provide fast and affordable backup and recovery, data protection must be performed in a systematic manner.

HP's Ultimate Business Protection Solution

HP offers solutions for the simplest to the most complex IT environments, running different operating systems and business applications as well as support for heterogeneous environments. How do you choose the strategy that is right for you? First, you need to consider and understand the value that your IT brings to the business. For example, can an application be down for 24 hours without significantly affecting the business? Or would an outage of just minutes be catastrophic? There are two key measures to help you assess this: the Recovery Time Objective (RTO), which is the amount of time a business process can be down; and the Recovery Point Objective (RPO), which is the amount of data you can afford to lose. For 24x7 applications, the RPO could be the most recent transaction, whereas for file servers it could be last night's backup. From here, you can consider the storage technologies available to give you the right level of protection against specific causes of data loss.

For example: Tape backup effectively protects against virus attacks because data can be restored from the most recent healthy backup. However, recovery time may be longer than your business can tolerate. Remote replication of data between sites can provide much faster recovery of a site disruption compared to tape. However, it cannot offer the same level of protection against accidental deletion or virus attacks.