Protecting Your Database: Proactivity In Security & Backup

Protecting Your Valuable Database

What Is A Database?

A database is a tool for collecting and organising information. They are ways of storing information in a structured and logical way. Databases can store information of any kind, whether it is about products or people, and the data can be viewed as lists or spreadsheets on a variety of different software programmes.

Why Use A Database?

Databases can store a large amount of records without taking up too much space. They make it easy to find information as they are simple to search and have the ability to edit with ease, you can add or delete data without much trouble. Databases have multi-access so anyone within the company can view or edit the data easily and it can also be imported into many other applications.

The Impact Of Data Loss On Business

David M. Smith (PhD) carried out a study that found that businesses have experienced 4.7 million events that caused a data loss at a cost of $18.2 million dollars altogether. He identified the six common causes of data loss to be: hardware failure, human error, software corruption, computer viruses, theft and hardware destruction.

Protecting Your Database

The first step to protecting your data is to establish a formal written back up plan. This can help to determine exactly which files and applications you need and use the most as a business, where the data will be stored within a backup and what software you can use to carry out that backup.

When deciding on backup software and solutions it is important to consider exactly how much data loss would be tolerable to your business in a disaster situation. Rather than wait and hope that such a scenario doesn’t occur it’s important to plan for such a case as the answer is likely to be ‘not a lot.’ How much time and money would it cost your business to replace just one days worth of data from a key corporate application?

Data loss isn’t just difficult in terms of business and money, it can also cause embarrassment and frustration for your staff, especially when a plan hasn’t been created to recover the data. It’s important to ascertain exactly how well your business could operate following a loss of data, and exactly how much downtime your company would need for database recovery on a specific application in the event of a database crash or corruption. The priority here is to create a high availability and disaster recovery solution that can insure the lowest form of impact on your business if your database goes down.

Back Up Solutions: Is Cloud The Way Forward?

Cloud Backup is becoming more and more popular within technology, but as with all solutions, many argue that there are upsides and downsides;

Advantages

Highly Accessible
Cloud platforms are easy to access due to the face that they run on the internet. This means that your business can access the data from any connected device such as tablets, smartphones, desktops or laptops just by logging into your cloud account.

Disaster Recovery
Having your database backed up to a remote solution such as the cloud means that your data is protected from any physical on-site damage. It is also quicker to restore these files as there isn’t any physical equipment needed to get the files back.

Cost Effective
This is the main reason that many businesses are beginning to use cloud storage. Using a cloud storage service provider means that you can pay a monthly fee to store data, and you don’t need to own or maintain any hardware that can be associated with backup storage.

Disadvantages

Security
Security has become less of an issue in recent years, as the cloud technology has developed significantly, but it is still true that data stored online is not 100% safe from malware and hackers. It’s important to weigh up the options of remote storage solutions in comparison to local solutions in terms of security.

Control
With some systems, it can be difficult to have full control over the storage process when using cloud platforms and this can be concerning for businesses that deal with highly sensitive data.

Speed
Creating a full backup can take a long time if you have a large amount of data because the internet transfer is limited to your businesses connection speed and bandwidth. The majority of local backup solutions beat cloud storage service solutions in terms of speed of access and backup.

How Can Backup And Recovery Services Help Me?

Solutions such as those that DSP offer ensure that your data is protected against system failure, physical corruption and logical corruption. Alongside many helpful services, dap bring a wealth of knowledge in many products such as RMAN (OracleRecovery Manager), Oracle Flashback, Oracle Block Change Tracking, SAN Replication and other third party back up solutions.

In terms of Microsoft database recovery, it’s important to remember that many software services rely on Microsoft SQL to run, such as SharePoint, CRM and SAP, and although Microsoft SQL consultants can help address any downtime issues here it’s better to be as proactive as possible and have backup architecture in place to avoid disaster situations.

The backup and recovery module by DSP offers checks to assess what business and technical requirements you have as a company, the suitability of existing Oracle backup strategies, the monitoring of Oracle backups, the reporting of exceptions and failures to backups and dap also perform tests that ensure Oracle backup recoveries can take place.