White Papers for Federal Information Security Management Act (FISMA)

It's Time for Recovery-focused Data Protection

EMC

Just a couple of years ago the “magic number” for recovering applications and data was four.In a 2004 research report, ESG found that if applications were up and running and critical data were recovered within four hours of an outage or a system failure, odds were favorable the business impact would be manageable. Five or more hours and the odds quickly soured. Users told ESG that the potential negative business consequences of this length of downtime would likely be significant and, in some cases, insurmountable.However, as the value of data within organizations has increased and regulatory and corporate governance requirements have mounted, the “magic number” for application and data recovery has decreased by orders of magnitude, from hours to mere minutes or, in many cases, to near zero or zero. Not being able to recover data quickly can cost organizations big dollars in terms of lost revenue, potential fines and reputation or brand damage.This is not to say that all applications and data are mission-critical (i.e., that they cannot withstand any downtime or loss, respectively) and therefore necessitate a true “recovery window” of zero. Some do and some don’t. But there is a “range of tolerability” for all applications and data, and, as this paper will demonstrate, this range continues to narrow.

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