Improve your backup and recovery strategy and meet your SLAs
According to a recent poll, less than a quarter of respondents are completely confident that 100% of their backed-up data can be recovered, with more than a third asserting that they were sure their data COULD NOT be 100% recovered. And one-third of respondents don’t know/are unsure they meet backup and recovery SLAs.
With database size continuing to exponentially grow, and corporate governance rules frequently making executives liable for the security of corporate information, it’s become increasingly important to make sure your backups are occurring efficiently. You need the proof that your data can be recovered in a secure and timely manner.
Here are the top 5 benefits of conducting a backup and recovery assessment of your environment, and some tips on ensuring that you get the information that is truly going to improve your backup and recovery strategy, and your day-to-day operations.
1. Reduce the Amount of Data Loss: It’s critical to ensure that your backups are actually occurring. A good assessment will uncover any data loss, and ensure your mission critical data is backed up according to established plans, and assess the integrity of the backup strategies across platforms.
Tip: Ensure your assessment covers all your database instances across your entire environment, regardless of platform. Ensure that the assessment will determine whether the appropriate monitoring and notification are in place, and recommend the best tools and strategies for moving forward.
2. Improve your Capacity Planning: An assessment will give you a complete picture of your current capacity across your entire environment, will let you know when you will exceed capacity, and tell you how plan for and appropriately scale your architecture to meet your projected data growth.
Tip: Ensure your assessment provides a roadmap for technology upgrades and enhancements for better meeting your storage and performance goals.
3. Improve your Service Levels: Part of a good assessment is recoverability testing that is benchmarked against your current SLAs. A detailed assessment will give you a picture of your recoverability success rate against services levels, analysis of any failures and bottlenecks, and recommendations for remediation, ultimately improving your Service Levels.
Tip: Ensure that your assessment includes testing and verification that you are meeting your recovery objectives.
4. Improve Security: An assessment will uncover where potential security and data integrity issues are occurring. With increased organization and federal compliance legislation, it’s important to know whether you are adhering to policies that govern the integrity of your data, and that you can report on your adherence.
Tip: Make sure your assessment includes a security policy and practices review.
5. Increase the Visibility of Day-to-Day Operations: A good assessment will uncover where your monitoring efforts are falling down, where performance bottlenecks are occurring, and document fixes and/or recommend tools to augment your current efforts. The increased visibility makes your DBA’s job easier to perform, which leads to increased employee retention: a good administrator is a terrible thing to waste.
Tip: Make sure your assessment includes complete documentation of your environment, so that you have a record of your current processes and procedures, another excellent tool for improved administrator efficiency.
