When it comes to data protection and disaster recovery, some less experienced planners may ask, "What's the worst that could happen?" It is only a matter of time before these individuals come to understand that unless a company's data is protected and a solid disaster recovery and business continuity plan is in place, that everything can be lost in the blink of an eye.

Business continuity planning and disaster recovery in financial services are not new concepts. However, given new rules around regulatory compliance and the unpredictable nature of our world, large-scale planning to protect corporate data in the event of an outage or disaster has become a higher priority.

Critical Steps Toward Preparedness

In taking the first steps toward disaster preparedness, start with these three actions:

1. Identify and understand your business-critical systems. Understanding and assessing your environment is the first step toward planning for a disaster. You will need to begin by identifying critical servers, business continuity objectives, and mandated requirements.

2. Plan for the rapid recovery of business operations following an unplanned outage. Look for a solution that complements your tape backup strategy by providing immediate failover capabilities. The overall goal is to minimize business disruptions and maintain a high level of confidence in the ability of your firm to resume working in a timely manner. A risk assessment process can help prioritize the most important applications. Create a detailed plan to address the following (but not limited to):

• Books and records backup and recovery
• Financial and operational assessments
• Alternate communications with customers and employees
• Business constituent, bank and counter-party impact
• Regulatory reporting
• Communications with regulators

3. Maintain a high level of confidence through ongoing use and testing, to ensure critical internal and external continuity plans are effective and compatible. Practice, practice, practice. The top mistake most companies make is creating a plan but not regularly exercising the crucial steps that make that plan work.

Mitigate Data Loss and Downtime with Asynchronous Replication

After deciding what data needs to be protected, the next most critical decision planners face is how to protect it. There are a multitude of different solution types available for protecting business-critical data, so how do you decide which one is right for you and your company?

Finding the answer to this question lies in focusing on two factors - how quickly you must recover your data and how much that data is worth to your company. Common solutions in the market today like tape backup and synchronous replication have been the "old standby" for planners for quite some time. Each can be part of an overall solution, but a successful recovery plan cannot rely exclusively on one of them for many reasons. Tape-based data protection, while cost effective, is error prone and only protects the data that existed at the time of the last backup. Synchronous replication, while able to protect data in real-time, is cost prohibitive, has distance limitations and is too complex for most companies to justify based on the value of the data being protected.

Another option, asynchronous replication, is an affordable and highly reliable method of data protection and recovery. It works by replicating data at the byte-level and sending it to a remote site - either across the country or across the world.

The benefits of asynchronous replication include:

• Real-time replication with the ability to recover at the exact time of the failure
• Replication of data over long distances without impacting the production application
• Ease of installation, configuration and maintenance at a low cost
• Works with your existing hardware and is application agnostic

Asynchronous technologies can guarantee business continuity and high availability by restoring access to data in minutes. By leveraging asynchronous replication, perhaps in conjunction with other data protection methods, as part of a carefully orchestrated disaster recovery and business continuity plan you can ensure that your data is protected and your business continues to function should the unimaginable happen.

Bob Roudebush is Director of Solutions Engineering, Double-Take Software, 317-598-0185, email: broudebush@nsisoftware.com; web: www.doubletake.com.