An effective information technology manger must be as adept at the application of data storage techniques relative to business continuity. The organization is counting on IT to have a plan in place that ensures that business operations will continue in the event of a disaster. Most organizations today have a 99% uptime requirement. This means that data services are available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, for 99% of the year. Data archiving supports a well-designed disaster recovery plan by moving a copy of the data used in the production environment physically away from the organization's data operations center to a remote location.
Instructions:
An effective information technology manger must be as adept at the application of data storage techniques relative to business continuity. The organization is counting on IT to have a plan in place that ensures that business operations will continue in the event of a disaster. Most organizations today have a 99% uptime requirement. This means that data services are available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, for 99% of the year. Data archiving supports a well-designed disaster recovery plan by moving a copy of the data used in the production environment physically away from the organization's data operations center to a remote location.
Imagine that your company has two locations-one in hurricane-prone Miami, Florida, and the other in earthquake-prone Los Angeles, California. The company policy is to handle data network storage in-house. The company processes high-volume transactions daily, and the data is considered mission critical.
Discuss your solution to archiving the company's data, and be prepared to defend your option versus other students'; proposals.
Elements of your answer should include the following:
- Hot site versus cold site
- Data mirroring capability
- Tape and optical drive backups
- Offsite data storage services
Grading Criteria:
Your paper should indicate that having an offsite data storage program is essential to supporting the goals of business continuity. The fact that the organization handles all of its data storage in-house is a risk, especially considered the environmental risks of each location.
In an ideal setting, the hot site data mirroring option would be preferred as it would ensure real-time backup of crucial data while also providing the shortest lead time between the system going down and coming back up at the hot site; however, this option is expensive.
A less cost-prohibitive option is the cold site because it does not have operational equipment in it but is a predetermined location for operations to move to in the event of a disaster. The lead time in setting up a cold site would severely effect business operations. Data archiving in the form of backup tapes or optical drive platters provide the data used in cold site recovery as well as day-to-day file recovery. Backup tapes typically contain a full backup performed once a week, with incremental backups done daily.