For many companies, the mark of what determines success is not how they do business on the average day, but how they handle adversity. Databases often contain expensive or even critical information for a company. The loss of this data for some companies could result in exorbitant expenses to replace it. Some companies may find themselves unable to even do business without it. Some companies, such as banks, could suffer worse than just out of business if they lose their data.
A decent disaster recovery plan ensures that your data can be restored regardless of how it was lost. A good plan does it quickly to minimize down time and embarrassment. A great plan ensures that the disaster never occurs in the first place.
Some of the techniques we use to protect your data are:
Prevention
Protection
Availability
P R E V E N T I O N
A number of measures can be taken to reduce the likelihood you will encounter a server outage. After all, the best plan is the one which prevents the disaster from ever occurring.
User Error
Limited permissions of certain databases, tables, or even columns to the necessary personnel protects against more than just sabotage. Limiting an employee’s ability to alter data protects against accidents as well.
Creating an application which the user can interface can provide more sophisticated permissions. You can determine not only which data can be changed, but also how. Interfaces can also help guide users to correct choices and warn them of dangerous ones. A good application will even improve employee performance.
Hardware Failure
Anything mechanical will eventually break. By the strategic use of redundant hardware, we can ensure that damaged hardware will not cause a loss of data. Through the use of RAID hard drive configurations and similar technologies, we can keep your database moving like nothing ever happened.
Physical Security
Believe it or not, one of the most common causes of servers being unexpectedly restarted is them getting accidentally unplugged. Effective physical security measures, starting with locked doors, can reduce your chances of unnecessary personnel damaging or restarting a server.
P R O T E C T I O N
The fundamental part of any disaster recovery plan is to ensure that you do not lose data. For many companies, if the data can at least be recovered, everything else seems small in comparison. When it comes to protecting your data, you need to ask how much of your data is protected and how many threats it is protected against.
Many companies operate with only nightly backups of their data. This provides the possibility of losing an entire day’s worth of data. This may be an acceptable loss, but often it is not. Differential and Transactional log backups can protect your data within minutes of your disaster. Transactional replication of your data can protect your data nearly instantly against some threats.
A good database administrator is a very paranoid individual. What will happen to your data if a hard drive fails? What if you lose power? What about if the building is on fire? A well protected database may have a battery backup, backups sent to a location far away, backups kept on hand, redundant hardware, and servers protected from fire, flood, or vandalism.
A V A I L A B I L I T Y
For many companies, just getting the data back isn't enough. While your database is being repaired, you may be losing sales, employee productivity, and reputation. By providing high-availability solutions, we ensure that when disaster strikes, your database keeps moving like nothing happened.
By making use of techniques such as clustering, mirroring, replication, RAID hard drive arrays, redundant network cards, and others, we can keep your database running nearly all the time. This allows you to repair your errors at your leisure while business keeps going as usual.
