With all the recent data breaches making headlines worldwide, IT teams everywhere are naturally concerned about the security of their companies’ digital assets—and whether or not their organizations will recover if data is stolen, lost or damaged. To be on the safe side, IT pros need to assume all their data is at risk and plan accordingly.
One of the best paradigms to consider for protecting your company’s digital assets focuses on three important areas: Confidentiality, Integrity and Availability—the CIA approach:
Confidentiality protects data from unauthorized users, physically and digitally. Start by keeping digital assets from leaving your company’s hands with a layer of physical security that encircles your data center—everything from the door locks to secure passwords on storage arrays. Next, encrypt the data so that it will be useless if it falls into the wrong hands. Also be sure to encrypt data at rest (in disk subsystems) as well as data in motion (tape that leaves the data center for off-site storage).
Integrity protects against authorized users who make a mistake or applications that fail and lead to data loss. By using backups, snapshots and replication to create recovery points and a forensic view of your environment, you can rewind to a time when the data was good and start fresh.
Availability refers to ensuring data uptime and access when it’s needed most. When designing a storage solution, match your systems to the availability needs of your organization. Equally important, the storage must be managed 24x7x365—whether on-site or remotely by a solution provider. You also need to decide whether or not off-site data replication is necessary to give you the ability to withstand a large-scale disaster. Disaster recovery-as-a-service may be a cost-effective option to consider.
To learn more about protecting your digital assets, explore three reasons why CIOs embrace new storage technologies at http://ow.ly/O3of2. You can also find out from this short video why not all disaster recovery partners are equal and what makes some providers stand out from the crowd: http://ow.ly/O6qBp.