As an IT professional, one of your most difficult jobs is getting senior managers on board with making a change. What can you say? Some people are just set in their ways. The task requires a savvy pro to convince management that changes are necessary to reduce costs and redirect the saving to fund specific projects and innovation, and ensure the success of the organization.

Some of you may find this to be the case for data backup and recovery too. Changes may be necessary given the critical importance placed on enterprise data.

These days, decisions-makers are finding that taking a hybrid approach to data protection is the way to go. Specifically, companies can often mix tape storage and the cloud to get the most effective results possible.

For example, the quick access to data stored in the cloud makes it a perfect technology for short-term information, in other words smaller sets of data that may have to be accessed and recovered often. Tape, on the other hand, is a much better option for archiving needs. The media has a long lifespan, making it a robust technology for long-term storage and a reliable means for complying with industry and government regulations.

There are several tips you can follow to make the case for updating and modernizing a backup and recovery plan.

1. Set a Target

Those in charge of the budget need to know what you plan on doing with the company’s money. So tell them. Of course, your ideas must be shaped by the organization’s objectives.

Continuing with the example of mixing technologies for backing up data, a company’s decision to invest more in tape or an emerging technology, will be determined by its requirements for recovery. If your industry is highly regulated, it’s probably better that you place a higher priority on tape and offsite tape vaulting.

2. Consider Infrastructure and Time

According to experts, companies should think about backup and recovery like this: The time it takes to back up information is on par with the capacity of all applications needed to be protected divided by the performance – measured in terabytes per hour – of a current solution.

To put it simply, part of making the case for making changes to a data protection program will require getting into the specifics. Decision-makers will want to know how effective the new, layered approach will be.

3. Be Sure to Mention the Cost of Downtime

We saved this one for last because it can serve as your “ace in the hole” or the “cherry on top” of a strong argument. Since the decision-maker is looking at a possible deployment in terms of dollars and cents, so should you. Let him or her know exactly what it will cost the company should it be cut off from critical data.

This figure will be different for individual organizations, but in this instance it’s OK to use industry averages to make your case.

Judging by industry estimates, energy firms are most impacted by downtime and can suffer losses of $2.8 million per hour. The average for telecoms is also up there, at $2 million per hour, followed by manufacturing firms, which stand to lose $1.6 million per hour of downtime. Financial firms, meanwhile, stand to lose about $1.5 million per hour when knocked offline.

No company wants to be caught in such a position, and no longer has to be, because innovative and reliable data backup options are available today.

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A string of tornadoes has been sweeping through the Midwest during the past few weeks, leaving severe damages in their wake. At the same time, the transition from winter weather to spring has also led to heavy rain storms in southern parts of the United States. Combined, these two weather juggernauts have led to countless power outages, damaged buildings and information that have either been lost, damaged or destroyed entirely.

In the recent period of storms has shown that the average man-made facility is not equipped to beat out the elemental forces of wind and water. Imagine for a moment, the chance a store or office has against onrushing flood waters stemming from a nearby body of water. The bricks themselves may stay standing, but water seeps into the foundation, into the deepest core of the building, inundating the basement with inches, and often feet of water that not only destroy many of the objects within, but also create enough mold and mildew damage to create major problems.

Similarly, a tornado meeting a building leaves the structure with little chance of withstanding the force of nature. Even a stone structure is vulnerable in the roof, where hail, which often precedes tornadoes, can weaken the facility, leaving it vulnerable to the twister that can pull it entirely off of the facility. This leaves the entire upper floor of the building in ruins, damaged by the thunderstorms that often surround cyclones.

The average business simply cannot hold up to the forces of nature, especially when you consider that a data center is typically located on the ground, which is often the most vulnerable. To avoid data loss incidents in the event of a natural disaster, organizations that often face seasonal risks may want to outsource their tape storage functions.

While an average building may not be able to keep up with nature, a facility run by an experienced information management company offers a level of sophistication that can withstand the fiercest elemental forces. Through careful study, third-party specialists can identify flood trends and build where water poses minimal risk. Careful construction allows buildings to withstand winds and avoid other major problems. Some providers even build in underground caverns and bunkers, providing a level of protection that is often unmatched in regular buildings, as these locations are strategically placed to avoid floods and safeguard records against all other threats.

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Recognizing the Data Drain

If you ask 10 different employees what is the leading contributor to the company’s energy bills, you’ll likely get 10 different answers. So what’s truly draining the resources of most organizations? Data.

Without data, the modern business is paralyzed. From employee insurance forms to market intelligence, companies take every precaution to ensure that information is safely stored and available whenever it is needed. The trouble is, few people outside the IT department understand where gigabytes go after you save a Word document or download a presentation. Not only does that data sit on your hard drive, it is likely backed up and eventually archived on tape, disk and in the cloud.

This information doesn’t sleep at night either. Servers are running and disks are spinning around the clock to make sure that data is secure. And as servers multiply and tape archives expand, the amount of energy consumed is immense. According to the Clipper Group, approximately 32 kilowatt-hours are consumed annually for each and every gigabyte of data held on SATA disks.

With companies now routinely storing terabytes of data, and some venturing into zettabyte territory, sustainability certainly comes to mind when looking at your monthly electric bill.

Turning to Tape

Whether for compliance requirements or business interests, the majority of data stored by companies is old records. Although they are not called upon for everyday operations (with 95% of data never accessed again after 90 days), they are still in the background siphoning their own portion of the electric grid. The good news is, relying on tape drives as opposed to disks can have a significant impact on energy consumption.

Although tape has its detractors, it continues to outpace the competition in terms of total cost of ownership and energy-efficiency. And when extrapolated to the massive scale of an offsite storage partner like Iron Mountain, the numbers speak for themselves.

Using the Environmental Protection Agency‘s conversion factor for kilowatt-hours to metric tons of carbon emissions, Iron Mountain’s customers cut approximately 1.7 billion tons of CO2 by storing their data on more than 79 million tapes as an alternative to disk storage. With this weight off their back, companies are free to manage leaner, more efficient systems that are better for the environment and better for the bottom line.

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The wheels might be turning right now for those of you whose companies haven’t prioritized data backup and recovery. Would you tear through backup tape after backup tape, just to find that one contract or internal email? If that didn’t work, would you go deeper? Perhaps call in a witch doctor or invoke a little black magic to return the information from the other side?
You’d be surprised what desperation can do to an IT professional, especially when compliance, reputation or financial success is on the line. But rest assured that cooler heads always prevail in the most trying of times.

Fortunately, it doesn’t have to be that bad. Unless you feel sitting around an Ouija board in the conference room, a company can also turn to the data backup and recovery services offered by professionals.

By taking a proactive approach to protecting data, decision-makers can rest assured that the organization’s data will be safeguarded against all types of threats – natural disasters and power outages, to name a few – and all other unenviable situations, including litigation. The process is made even easier and more effective when you rely on the services of an information management company.

While necessary, the right approach to data backup and recovery may be too complex for your company to tackle on its own. It’s best to leave it up to the pros. Between backing up data and completing the process to recover and restore it, the whole thing takes too much in the way of expertise and resources for the average company.

Professionals – we’re talking information management, not black magic here – can provide offsite tape storage and recovery services that allow companies to find information when it’s needed most. That sure beats contacting the undead to lend a bit of assistance.

Summary: You’d be surprised what desperation can do to an IT professional, especially when compliance, reputation or financial success is on the line. But rest assured that cooler heads always prevail in the most trying of times.

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I wanted a sports car with two doors and chrome rims that could hit 60 miles per hour in the blink of an eye. I was a kid only thinking about the superficial. It took some time, but I finally got that dream car.

And then everything changed. The maintenance bills started rolling in (thanks, Boston potholes), I settled down and started a family. Having twins can certainly change your perspective, not to mention your transportation needs. So back to the Accord and its proven reliability we went.

This story got me thinking about data protection and how enterprise needs are suddenly changing. It seems that many companies are now giving up the reliability of tape-based data backup strategies (the Accord) in favor of the new, flashier option that is the cloud (the sports car).

Tape is a proven, inexpensive and reliable solution. It may not be as trendy as today’s cloud-based offerings, but as big data continues to get bigger and bigger, we need these cost-effective and reliable strategies to help us store the massive amounts of data we are producing. Time and again, tape storage has proven it can fill that role.

Still, companies are looking elsewhere for data protection because hosted technologies are perceived as more modern and easier to maintain. But they can’t deliver the same level of reliability and cost that you get with a tape-based solution.

So why not have both? What I didn’t mention above is that I still have a sports car, only now it’s not the family’s primary mode of transportation. When hauling the kids around we all jump into the Accord, load up the trunk and we’re on our way. When it’s just me, maybe looking to turn a few heads, I take the sports car out for a spin.

It can be the same with data backup. You can combine the two to satisfy all of the company’s needs. Businesses can turn to the more traditional and reliable offsite tape storage for long-term archiving, but also have the cloud to handle data recoveries that require a quick turnaround.

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• The Cloud: Will It Rise to the Occasion When You Need It Most?
• Should You Chase the Cloud?

That has translated into many of you debating its merits and comparing it to traditional, time-tested technologies. This is prevalent on the subject of data back and recovery, with many people asking: Which is better, the cloud, disk or tape? Unfortunately, the answer to your question is not always clear-cut, as there are plenty of rough edges.

For a solution that has proven worthy for long-term archiving (i.e. it is cost effective and relied on by companies the world over) tape is the way to go.

Iron Mountain’s own Blaine Rigler, the company’s senior vice-president and general manager of data backup and recovery, reiterated that stance in an interview with Computerworld.

“Bit error rates are considerably better for tape than disk, making tape a more favorable option for applications requiring encryption and compression,” he recently told the technology news provider. “Tape media also has a much longer storage life than disk, eliminating the need to migrate data to new media as frequently and reducing labor-intensive conversion costs.”

While the cloud is the new “it” technology for organizations, tape storage continues to chug along as one of the most battle-tested strategies out there. Tape still takes top billing when it comes to storing and maintaining information for prolonged time periods.

Of course, it’s also worth noting that a tape-based strategy for data archiving is made better through the partnership between a company and an information management firm such as Iron Mountain.

What data specialists provided is a high level of expertise that few companies can match within their own organizations. Professionals know to handle backup tapes with care and can transport them to an offsite facility securely in order to store them for the long term. Furthermore, the consulting offered by a information management company will ensure that all compliance requirements for the retention of information are satisfied.

• The Cloud: Part of Your Enterprise Backup Team?
• Is a Cloud-Based Data Storage Service on Your Company’s Horizon?
• The Cloud: Will It Rise to the Occasion When You Need It Most?

Should You Chase the Cloud?

For example, if you were into playing the lottery and you heard about a game that gave you a 45 percent chance of winning, you probably wouldn’t think twice about laying down some cash for a ticket. You’d feel pretty good about your prospects, right?

But let’s look at it from another angle. What if you wanted to go skydiving, but just before boarding the plane, the instructor explains that your parachute only has a 45 percent chance of opening? Something tells me you’d be keeping your feet firmly planted on the ground.

Obviously, these are imaginary scenarios – good luck getting those odds on your next Powerball ticket – but they show that percentages can be ambiguous.

If you read our Data Backup and Recovery Benchmark Survey, you saw that 45 percent of responders reported smooth sailing when it comes to recovering data within their organizations. This is one of the largest percentages in the entire survey, and it’s encouraging that so many businesses are having success with data recovery.

Still, that leaves a larger 55 percent that struggled to meet RPOs and RTOs – or failed to recover the data in question at all. In other words, there’s a lot of room for that 45 percent to grow.

What was the most recent data recovery event you encountered in your organization? Were you able to navigate it smoothly?

If you take our five-minute Data Backup and Recovery Benchmark Survey, you’ll have a 100 percent chance of receiving a customized report that shows how your data recovery capabilities compare with other organizations’.

Everyone’s a winner at ironmountain.com/databackupreport.

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Did you know that, out of the more than 1,200 participants in our recent Data Backup and Recovery Benchmark Survey, only 17 percent said they have a formal, company-wide retention and destruction policy that classifies data, considers regulatory and organizational requirements and is applied to all departments/locations in the organization?

That’s a pretty low number – especially when you consider how common retention and destruction policies are in our everyday lives.

For example, you may not be aware of it, but every time you give the milk an extra sniff before pouring it into your bowl of corn flakes, you’re enacting an informal retention and destruction policy. Same goes for that box of outdated magazines you finally decided to trash. Heck, even your kids are doing it: How many times have you taken them to the mall with a bag full of old video games they can trade in for store credit?

You’d think with how often we make decisions about what to retain and what to destroy, we’d be more inclined to institute such policies in our businesses. Still, knowing when and how to clean house can be a daunting proposition.

How does your company handle the retention and destruction of information? If you’d like to know how your policies compare with those of other organizations, take our short Data Backup and Recovery Benchmark Survey.

While you do that, I’ll work on convincing myself that I don’t really need my high school letterman jacket anymore.

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• Five Tips for Better Data Management and Recovery Practices
• Your Data Backup Windows Are So Cliché
• Captain Obvious Asks: “What are Your Top Data Management Challenges?”

The main issue for companies is the sheer volume of the data they produce, and therefore, must cover under data protection measures.

“At its basic level, controlling data is about controlling risk,” Iron Mountain’s senior vice president and general manager of data backup and recovery Blaine Rigler said, “which means being prepared in the event of disaster so that you can restore your business without losing its most important asset –information.”

“The right data practices will help deliver peace of mind, while ensuring you can reduce costs, protect your organization from unnecessary legal risks and increase overall confidence in your backup processes,” he added.

To help with such challenges, Iron Mountain offered several tips for companies when it comes to data management:

1. Adapt and Grow

The chances that a company’s data storage needs will remain the same over time are slim. At some point, all organizations will find themselves in a situation where wholesale changes are necessary to keep up with the data flood. In such instances, on-premise systems can be expanded, or the organization can utilize the services of a information management firm.

2. Let It Go (Intelligently)

It’s important to keep in mind that not all information must be retained. So when it comes to identifying data that can be destroyed, companies are encouraged to employ the destruction services of a specialist to ensure that such information is disposed of properly.

3. Keep Offsite Storage in Mind

“When in doubt, move it out,” Iron Mountain’s report encouraged. That means companies shouldn’t shy away from offsite data storage if they are unsure whether or not their on-premise systems will meet all compliance management considerations. Professional information management firms can ensure that all data is stored as required by various regulations.

4. Don’t Forget Backup Data Is A Record

The information stored through a company’s offsite tape storage strategy, or any backup method for that matter, may be requested by an opposing party during litigation, the report said. As such, the organization must be sure that such data is reasonably accessible and can be produced in time to meet discovery deadlines.

5. Enforce Policies

Every company’s information management practices should be accompanied by a policy that details employee responsibilities for storing, backing up and retaining enterprise data. If a policy is communicated regularly, the chances of a company having the ability to recover from an IT disaster, or meet the requirements of a regulatory standard, will be much better.

Contracting a third-party information management firm may be a company’s best bet when it comes to growing data volumes. In addition to the capabilities of professional data storage specialists, the model is also cost-effective, as the burden of maintaining data is shifted away from the company, allowing it to focus on other matters.

Do you have questions about data backup and recovery? Read additional Knowledge Center stories on this subject, or contact Iron Mountain’s Data Backup and Recovery team. You’ll be connected with a knowledgeable product and services specialist who can address your specific challenges.

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