| | December 20188CIOReviewADOPTING THE RIGHT DISASTER RECOVERY TECHNIQUESOnce you've decided on how frequently you need to back up your systems, you need to decide what information should be backed up:· Databases, physical servers, virtual machines, and unstructured files should all be under consideration. · Are there different requirements for users' files versus other unstructured data types? Your mission-critical data may be backed up hourly, but those. MP3 files sitting in a user's home directory are far less critical, and may only be backed up weekly (if at all!).And finally where to back up your systems:· On-premise, if you are fortunate enough to operate a second datacenter. · Off-premise: disaster-recovery-as-a-service, or DRaaS, providers.· Cloud.· A combination of the above.After the business requirements have been defined, there are quite a few ways to accomplish your DR strategy, no matter what combination of when/what/where you have decided on. Solution cost, the business tolerance for downtime, frequency of file access, importance of files, and performance considerations (in the case of Internet latency) are all additional considerations when looking at DR solutions. For example, less frequently accessed files that need to be kept a long time for compliance reasons might be a good candidate for cloud archive tiers, like Amazon's Glacier.Let's look at the different types of data you'll likely to want to recover in the event of a disaster.Back in 1996, one of my jobs was to ensure backups were run on our systems. At the time, we didn't have many servers, nor did we have much more than a few hundred gigabytes of data. Some backup software and some DLT tapes were all that we needed.Once the digital revolution hit medical imaging, our disk consumption skyrocketed into many hundreds of terabytes. Our little backup server and its one tape drive quickly became a liability to the business: there was no way to back up that much data within a 24-hour period, and we just didn't have the space to deploy a robotic tape array (as many similar organizations were doing at the time). Our tolerance for data loss was low, so we stood up a storage area network, boot-from-SAN capabilities, a secondary datacenter, and implemented asynchronous disk array replication and "business continuance volumes."In 2018, the options available for disaster recovery (DR) are greater than they were in 1996. Through the years, however, the basic queries for disaster recovery haven't changed--what files types are being backed up, where are those backups being stored, how often are the backups occurring, and most importantly, are those backups being tested? Engage the businessBefore deciding on a solution to implement a disaster recovery strategy, it's important to understand what the business requirements are for disaster survivability. · What level of data loss is an organization willing to tolerate when restoring from a disaster? For lower data loss, a smaller RPO, or recovery point objective, will be needed. · After a disaster, does the organization want to return to business operations quickly? If so, then a small RTO, or recovery time objective, will be needed. If cloud is your DR strategy, make sure to take into account latency in getting your data back on premise.By Todd Thomas, CIO, ARA Diagnostic ImagingIN MY OPINION
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