IT Disaster Recovery Planning For Dummies®

Chapter 8. Planning Data Recovery

It's all about the data.

That pretty much sums it up. But don't close the book yet. I have a lot of details to cover about how to protect that data.

I don't blame you if you're confused because I say that it's all about the data. Security products have, in the past, been largely network-centric: Firewalls and intrusion detection systems are network-based tools, leading many IT professionals (myself included) to believe that their networks needed the protection. But your network is only your private highway that leads to what really matters—your data.

This chapter focuses on protecting your organization's data so you don't find yourself in a jam when a disaster strikes—instead, you're prepared to resume processing at a later time in your same location or soon in a different location.

Protecting and Recovering Application Data

If you know that your most valuable IT assets are your databases, protecting them is just a matter of incorporating some backup or replication scheme to make them more readily available if a disaster strikes. Right?

Not so fast.

In most organizations, although they store much of the data centrally in databases, they also store some of the data elsewhere. And probably only a few people are familiar with the details of the data that exists in the backwater places in your network.

Locating all your data requires some sleuthing. You need a process-centric view that uncovers all of the ins and outs of your data (where the data comes from ...