How many of you have a backup horror story to tell? Remember when Pixar almost lost 6 months work on Toy Story 2?
The world is full of backup horror stories. With the amount of data we are generating, coupled with rules and regulations on retention, professionals tasked with backing up data have a constant battle on their hands. They need to be able to backup more data faster and more importantly they need to be confident they can restore that data rapidly in case of emergency.
The good news is that not all data is the same and you can deliniate policies for backup based on the importance of data. The bad news is you likely do not have a good way of understanding where that data is and if it is protected appropriately. You may have multiple copies of some files spread across multiple domains on your network. You may have unimportant files that have not been accessed in over 10 years consuming valuable space on backup devices, when those files should have been archived or deleted. With the mushrooming data sets you are dealing with how can you keep all of this under control and improve your backup.
The answer has to lie in a data catalog that can be aligned with data management, backup and archiving policy. A good data catalog should :-
- Give you visibility into all of your data.
- Provide you with actionable utilization and data efficiency information.
- Help secure your data by enabling the correct access controls to be inplemented and monitored across your datasets and users.
- Help ensure compliance by enabling policies to be set for data retention, and destruction
- Improve backup efficiency and enable valuable IT resources to be redirected to projects that drive the business forward.
A data catalog just makes sense. Most IT professionals have some king of scientific background, and catalogs are how we make sense of the world in science. The Periodic Table is a simple catalog of the elements and their relative properties. In Biology with have a Taxonomy that classifies millions of species. With this structure everything gets simpler to understand and manipulate. The same is true for data.
I have recently been writing a series of blogs on catalogging and managing the data deluge for Catalogic Software. My lastest is on the 'Top 5 reasons for building a data
Catalog."
Backup and archiving are constant improvement projects for all IT organizations. If you are looking at the next steps in how to improve your backup I encourage you to look at building an Enterprise Data Catalog. Maybe breaking your current backup can be a good thing.
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