For the rest of us, however, the cash to build a customized data center in waiting is not in the budget. The next best option is to buy a contract with a disaster-recovery facilities service provider, test your recovery strategy often and cross your fingers. For providers of this nature, the flexibility of data restore is often just as important as speed of restore, because commercial disaster-recovery facilities are often oversubscribed and can seldom guarantee that storage platforms identical to those used in your production setting will be available for recovery. Thus, being able to restore data to an alternative platform may be key to getting your enterprise back in business quickly after an interruption.
Score one for tape, which provides the means to restore data on the fly to whichever set of LUNs (logical unit numbers) is available.
Disk-to-disk advocates suggest that times are changing. Enabled by Fibre Channel fabrics, new software and inexpensive Serial ATA disk arrays, disk to disk may improve the economics and efficiencies of data protection, they say. Numerous vendors, including Breece Hill, Nexsan and Quantum, have introduced disk-based products that place a second tier of disk between primary or production arrays and tape-backup libraries, shortening backup time and expediting restores. Breece Hill combines disk and a tape autoloader in the same box, aimed at small and midsize businesses.
Some vendors use disk to emulate tape, taking advantage of the speed of disk to expedite backup processes, then dumping the data from aggregated backup streams to tape as an off-line process. Others use a Tier 2 disk platform as disk, providing a means to restore specific files rapidly in the event of accidental corruption, as well as a location for performing data-hygiene functions, such as virus scanning, junk-data purging and duplicate-data elimination, before the data is written to tape.
Meanwhile, products from Arkivio, Avamar Technologies and other vendors seek to advance data protection beyond simple data copying and into data life-cycle management. They provide a less expensive home for infrequently accessed data, and management tools for migrating the data from Tier 2 to disk or optical--or into the waste bin--as access requirements dictate.
All these "enhanced backup" products are expanding the options for data copying and data protection. Last year, these burgeoning approaches were in the process of being vetted by a nascent industry association, EBSI (Enhanced Backup Solutions Initiative), when the popular organization was first blockaded, then absorbed, by SNIA (Storage Networking Industry Association).
To realize the benefits of cloud-native software, an application must actually be cloud-native—designed to run in the cloud, interacting with disaggregated cloud services, fully manageable as code—to deliver the expected benefits.
By combining resources and expertise, the AI-Enabled ICT Workforce Consortium will offer a blueprint for how industries can adapt to an AI-dominated future.
IT leaders should heed the guidance of cybersecurity insurance providers who think businesses should prioritize security education, incident preparedness, regular internal audits, and ongoing vulnerability scanning and patching.
