Service Management for Dummies®

Chapter 14. Data Management in a Service Management World

In This Chapter

• Understanding the key elements of data management

• Knowing the various types of data

• Providing access to data

• Making data secure

• Preparing a disaster-recovery plan

Perhaps your company delivers an online service to small businesses. It helps businesses track and manage their consultant workload, managing contracts, project proposals, project management, expense reporting, and so on. This information comes from multiple customers in multiple locations. Your servers store all the data. You also provide your clients industry information that you pull from multiple sources and tailor to your clients. Service-level agreements (SLAs) make sure that your customers can access this service 24/7 and that if the system does goes down, you'll restore service in a certain amount of time.

One day, a customer reports that she can't access her account. Then more customers call your service desk with the same complaint. You realize that all the servers have shut down because of a flood. You can't restore the service and recover the data because you didn't back up the servers in the past month and didn't have a secondary storage facility. Heads roll. Lawsuits are filed. Your company goes out of business.

This extreme example shows the importance of data management in meeting customer expectations.

In this chapter, we look at the key issues that need to be part of your data management strategy: data delivery, storage, and retrieval; backup ...