As drives get smaller and smaller, drive heads come closer and closer to the rotating media. The results are more frequent equipment failures and more destructive data losses.
• A company attempts to restore lost data from carefully collected backups, only to discover the backups are unreadable.
• A RAID system’s cooling process collapses, causing its drives to overheat and fail.
• An MIS administrator completes a fix on a mirrored drive without shutting off the mirror, losing the reference point for the original data.
• A business adds a drive to its NetWare server, accidentally erasing the server’s partitions.
Data loss disasters like these are becoming increasingly commonplace. This is due, in part, to rapidly changing computer technologies. The increase in data disasters also stems from the sheer volume of data generated by modern companies and the decentralized way that data is produced, collected, and stored. As distributed network models proliferate, and organizations continue to open their doors to the Internet, threats to data integrity and data security are compounded.
While data backups would seem to offer an effective shield against these threats, backups do not always provide comprehensive data protection. That is because the data backup plans developed by many companies are not fully realized or, worse yet, not followed.
What is more, individuals often fail to test the “restore” capabilities of their backup media. If the backups are faulty, a simple data loss can quickly become a data disaster. Finally, even if backups are successful, they only contain data collected during the most recent backup session. As a result, a data loss can potentially rob you of your most current data, despite your backup attempts.
The reality of data loss forces business executives to ask themselves some serious questions. For example:
- Does a major data loss put your business interests at risk?
- Does data loss expose your company to legal repercussions?
- How susceptible are your data storage devices to corruptions and crashes?
- What can be done to properly protect and recover critical data?
The importance of computer data to the daily operation of your organization requires you not only to ask these questions, but to successfully answer them as well.