Download - Effective Strategies for Backup, Recovsdgery and Archiving

7/28/2019 Effective Strategies for Backup, Recovsdgery and Archiving

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Contents

Executive summary. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4

Backup and archivingwhat, and why? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5

BackupsITs time machine. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5

Archivesmore than just history. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6

Backup and archiving: new costs, challenges, and risks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7

Storage demands of the IT-centric business . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7

Protection in a world of risk . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7

A changing landscape . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8

Backup and archiving practices . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8

Backup technology and management . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8

Archivingtechnical and legal challenges . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9

Risks from informal content collections . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10

Special requirements of legal discovery . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10

Classification and search. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10

Legal hold . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11

Journalinghow much, and when? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11

Conclusions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12

Steps toward the future. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13

About Symantec . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14

White Paper: Backup and Recovery

Effective Strategies for Backup, Archiving,

and Recovery


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Effective Strategies for Backup, Archiving, and Recovery

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Executive summary

Backups protect active information for use; archives store information to improve the efficiency

of messaging applications and storage infrastructure, and to meet legal and policy requirements.

Too often overlooked, archiving can help organizations cut backup time and storage dramatically;

eliminate expensive, time-wasting, risky employee email collections; and accelerate search and

legal discovery.

Pressures on backup processes have grown with the volume of information that needs

protection. New storage technologies add management complexity. Centralizing backup storage

and management across geographies and technologies offers end-to-end visibility across backup

environments and supports cost-effective, future-ready strategies such as tiered storage.

Archiving faces growth not only in the volume and variety of unstructured information, but

also in the urgency of demands to find and produce records quickly for employees, regulators, and

courts. Choices of what, where, and how to archive have major impact on storage costs.

As storage volume continues to grow, the move from tape to disk, multimedia email and

collaboration content, and increased regulation and litigation will demand planned, balanced,

effective backup and archiving processes.


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Backup and archivingwhat, and why?

Backup1 processes are mature and near-universal. Archiving is not as well understood or widely

practiced. Outsiders often confuse it with backup, and even IT professionals see a lot of overlap:

Both are data management disciplines that use similar resources and present similar challenges.

But despite similarities, archiving differs from backup in purpose, context, and applications.

Important today, these differences will grow dramatically along with the volume and sensitivity

of information, and with legal requirements to produce it on demand. Organizations that

complement their backup solutions with archiving help themselves to greater efficiency at lower

cost, and to more effective management of IT risk.

This paper outlines backup and archiving for IT and business readers; points out their

differences; and shows why both are important to balance data protection, compliance risk, and

efficiency.

BackupsITs time machine

Backups exist to protect active information and quickly restore it to use after corruption or loss

due to an error, mishap, or disaster. As an organization's time machine, backups restore a single

document, a server, or an entire organization to a point in time before data became corrupted

or lost. Frequent point-in-time copies minimize irrecoverable losses; continuous data protection(CDP) technologies eliminate them. Multiple copies of backups across geographies protect

information against disasters that affect an entire site or region.

Backup metrics focus on weighing recovery quality (recovery point objective, or RPO) and

speed (recovery time objective, or RTO) against the production time lost to backup processes (the

backup window), and of course cost. Backup infrastructure is easy to cost-justify, because poor

processes place an organization at the mercy of errors and events that managers can and should

anticipate.


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Archivesmore than just history

Information expires: An out of office email reply is useful for a few hours; a product brochure for

a year or two. But the end of its useful life cant always be predictedand laws, regulations, or

corporate policies may mandate that it be kept long afterwards. Retaining all this information in

multiple point-in-time backups on high-priority storage with hair-trigger recovery capability would

be extravagantly wasteful and risky. End-of-life information should be archived.

Archives document the past, proving compliance with tax, securities, and other government

regulations and with an organization's own governance policies. But as organizations enforce

more aggressive sunset rules for unstructured information, archives have assumed an even more

important role: to improve efficiency of applications and of backup and storage processes.

The value of archiving stems from its built-in efficiency. Backups make multiple versions

one for each point in time, and several across geographies. An archive, in contrast, contains

one instance of each document. Archives keep records available to employees, regulators, and

courts as required, with expiration policies set to as long as necessarybut no longer. Metrics for

archiving focus on its strengths: efficiency and cost-effectiveness.

Yet compared to backup, archiving can be a tough sell internally, because:

Business managers who know they need backups may be tempted to use them as though they

were archives

Unlike backup, archiving offers few compelling bet the company scenarios

Recovery and discovery requirements are so unpredictable and variable that it is difficult to

quantify how much archiving reduces compliance risk

Backup and archiving at a glance

Backup Archiving

Purpose Recover useful information 1. Move information to more efficient tier

2. Enforce retention for governance,

compliance, eDiscovery, etc.

Point-in-time copies Many, plus CDP for highly time-

sensitive information

Single global instance

Geographic copies Yes, to recover from site or regional

disasters

Yes, to protect the archive

Metrics RPO and RTO against backup window

and costs

Time and cost to maintain

Expiration policy No Strict enforcement of retention and expiry

policies

Risks Loss of business Increased storage costs, legal/regulatory

exposure, loss of productivity


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Backup and archiving: new costs, challenges, and risks

Long-term storage trends and rising risks in IT and business environments are combining to drive

innovations in technology and processes for both backup and archiving.

Storage demands of the IT-centric business

Now more than ever, business runs on IT. In the United States alone, 2006 IT investments totaled

almost US$1.2 trillion, a full 29 percent of overall private-sector capital investment.2 The storage

component of IT investments is growing at a disproportionate rate: Disk-based storage capacity

grew 52 percent in 2006.3 None of these numbers will surprise IT professionals who have seen

their own organizations expand IT to cover more business applications every year as well as

vigorous year-over-year growth in storagefirst for email text, then graphics, then audio, and now

video files that grow steadily in resolution and length.

Protecting all of this information requires careful planning and management. The wrong

processes can burden a thousand laptops with huge files attached to an all employees email,

add a thousand copies to the next backup run, and allow multiple versions to spring up in formal

and informal archives.

Protection in a world of riskBackup and archiving affect risk as well as cost. Organizations need to consider not only the IT

risks these processes mitigate, but also those they may introduce:

Security riskthat processes will allow unencrypted information to be accessed, manipulated,

or used by unauthorized parties

Availability riskthat errors, disasters, backup windows, or restrictive security will keep

information from those with a legitimate business use

Performance riskthat poorly designed or overloaded systems, networks, and storage will

impede the flow of information, and the pace of business

Compliance riskthat inadequate processes will expose an organization to adverse rulings andjudgments or to excessive costs during legal discovery


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Financial risk managers would add the costs of IT infrastructure to cope with the rising tide

of information and the advanced technology, expertise, and processes needed to keep it under

control.

A changing landscape

Changing storage and risk environments are the main drivers of backup and archiving, but not the

only ones: Here are just a few other trends with direct impact on backup and archiving:

Email is now many employees primary information repository, and desktop search capabilitiesare reducing their incentive to manage files effectively.

Regulators are demanding longer retention of more documentsand their demands during

discovery are also increasing.

Backup administrators are seeing increased pressure on their backup windows and restore

targets.

Storage infrastructure is growing more complex, solving capacity and performance problems

but raising management challenges.

Backup and archiving processes must address these issues using the most cost-effective

technology, without introducing unacceptable risks or compromising business effectiveness. Thenext section outlines a set of practices to help administrators achieve the right balance.

Backup and archiving practices

Backup is the more established of the two processes. Most organizations will react first to

pressures that compromise its effectiveness: shrinking backup windows and more aggressive

restore schedules for data, applications, and systems. Technology and management solutions can

help meet these challengesbut administrators should not overlook the dramatic improvements

in backup performance available by using archiving to offload much of the backup burden.

Backup technology and management

Not too long ago, backup technology choices were simpler: Select the fastest storage you can

afford for your most time-sensitive, mission-critical information, and use tape for everything else.

But simple choices sometimes mean difficult compromises: Recovery time objectives for most

information fall in the gap between seconds and weeks. New additions to the storage toolkit fill


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in between these extremes, with intermediate technologies that are much cheaper than storage

area networks and that offer much higher performance than tape. These new technologies

help organizations optimize their backup environments, balancing performance with cost for

information at every level of urgency.

New storage technologies can provide instant backup of mission-critical, time-sensitive

information. At the other end of the spectrum, disk storage that is plug-compatible with tape

drives offers dramatic performance improvements using established processes.

Managing all these technologies can be a nightmare, especially when information priorities

and organizational goals change over time. Backup solutions that offer visibility and control over

all classes of storage let administrators assign information to backup storage based on its urgency

and valueand move it easily when priorities change.

Centralizing storage management across geographically distributed data centers and remote

offices introduces further efficiencies by consolidating administrative activities that would

otherwise have to be accomplished by local, often nonspecialist personnel.

Archivingtechnical and legal challenges

The technical challenges of archiving are driven by the volume and variety of unstructured

information that organizations must retain to meet corporate governance standards, industryregulations, and legal obligations:

Email volume continues to grow, even as unified messaging technologies promise to add

voicemail, pictures, and video.

Most employees at medium to large businesses already use instant messaging (IM)

technologies,4 and more are on the way.5

Messaging and collaboration tools such as Microsoft SharePoint, the constant churn

of document formats, and end users attempts to retain control of files and messages all

complicate the environment.

The result is large data repositories that are spread out across the organization. These are

nearly impossible to consolidate and search, and the most common attempts to manage them

email quotas and aggressive expiration policiestrigger risky informal workarounds.


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Risks from informal content collections

Archives replace the sprawling, informal collections of unstructured content that employees

create to avoid losing their email to an aggressive sunset policy.

These collections (Microsoft Exchange PST files, for example) clog terabytes of storage on

desktop hard drives and shared storage, spilling out onto portable media, Web mail services, and

home PCs. They are difficult to search, notoriously prone to corruption, a burden on backup time

and storage, and wasteful of employees time. Worse, they are all potential targets for legal or

regulatory discovery. Legal discovery from unmanaged records such as these risks smoking gun

revelations that can prove devastating in courtor in the media.

Informal collections add significant cost and risk, leading many organizations to review their

backup processes and add managed, disciplined, policy-driven archiving to their data protection

arsenal.

Special requirements of legal discovery

Stringent and escalating legal requirements govern the retention and discovery of archived

information. At a minimum, an organizations retention policies must be unambiguous,

documented, and enforced. U.S. Federal Rules for Civil Procedure; the governance and reporting

requirements of Sarbanes-Oxley, IRS, and the SEC; and other regulations demonstrate whyorganizations need to establish what information they will keep, and for how long.

The drop everything urgency of legal discovery can disrupt IT operations and pull technical

specialists away from their primary responsibilities into unfamiliar and uncomfortable roles.

But the situation is improving: Organizations such as the Electronic Discovery Reference Model

(EDRM) Project have created frameworks for electronic legal discovery that help balance legal

requirements with the interests and capabilities of inside and outside counsel, IT, internal staff,

specialist legal discovery firms, and solution providers.

Classification and search

Effective support for electronic discovery requires classification and intelligent archiving

of unstructured information over a broad range of current and obsolete file types. Search

capabilities should accommodate end-user searches for preliminary information screening, and be

capable of integration with established legal discovery tools so that outside discovery specialists

will not need to rely on IT staff to do their work.


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Legal hold

Legal discovery often involves holds to protect specified documents or document classes from

destruction or tampering. The standard approach is to copy everything to a secure file, but this is

far from ideal: First, it doubles not only the storage volume required for the archive, but also with

all associated costs. Second, it opens the door for the new copy to be reconciled with the active

archive and any information retained on desktops. Discrepancies demand explanations and can

be embarrassing in the media or in court. A much more attractive alternative is to hold documents

in place and preserve the integrity of specified files in the archive, eliminating costly copies and a

risky duplication process.

Journalinghow much, and when?

Mailbox-level archiving, consistently enforced, is a legally defensible component of a disciplined,

reasonable retention policy. Journalingrecording of all email to and from an individual or list of

individualsmay be necessary for financial services firms operating under SEC Rule 17A-4 and

NASD 3110-1, and for communications involving certain corporate officers and legal counsel. But

few organizations will need to journal all employee communications.

When journaling is requiredeither for the above reasons or as proof of completeness and

chain of custodyit is important to do it correctly: as an archive process, not an email process.Email journalsstored in a single mailboxquickly grow very large and ripple through point-

in-time and geographic backups, consuming backup windows and storage space with every new

copy. Advanced archiving solutions sweep journal contents directly into the archive. This offloads

the burden from the email application and backup processes, and it provides cost-effective single-

instance storage, indexed for quick retrieval. The increased value of archives, in comparison to

backups, for unstructured content is more compelling for email journals than for any other use.


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Conclusions

Confusing backup with archiving processes, organizations sometimes use backups to store and

recover historical records. But making multiple-instance geographic and point-in-time backups

of non-current information cuts into backup and recovery windowsand wastes vast amounts of

storage. Worse, it increases costs, disruption, and delay during legal discovery, and it introduces

unnecessary risks when multiple, incompatible records must be reconciled or explained in court.

(See the sidebar "Backups are not archives" for details.)

Archiving is the correct tool for protecting, organizing, and searching unstructured

information: It provides an organized, searchable store of single-instance records, with

capabilities to meet the specialized, absolute demands of legal discovery. De-duplication,

integrated storage management, and self-service search offload work from backup systems and

messaging and collaboration applications, reduce storage costs, and satisfy end-user expectations

for accessibility of email messages and files.

Archives prove their worth with the first legal hold or discovery requirement. But even

without any such requirement, they pay back quickly by simplifying and reducing the storage and

management burden on backup processes.

Backups are not archives

Backup processes are superficially similar

to archiving. Because a great deal of time,

effort, and infrastructure go into backups,

it is tempting to use the same processes

and infrastructure for archiving. But it is a

bad idea.

This approach misses several key differences

between backups and archives, and in the

long run can be extremely costly. Here iswhy:

EfficiencyAll copies of archived

information are removed from primary

and backup storage, improving its

performance.

CapacityArchives are compressed and

de-duplicated, down to a single instance in

some cases, for dramatic capacity gains.

ManagementRegulatory compliance and

corporate compliance demand different

management processes for archives and

backups.

ProtectionNoncompliant extra copies

of documents raise the costs of legal

discovery and may also increase legal

risks.

Backup is the wrong process for archiving,

especially when the time comes to locate

and produce a record for legal discovery.

Attempts to adapt backup processes for

archiving are also false economy; a properly

managed archive can cut costs of backup

and recovery even as it makes them moreefficient.


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Symantec products for backup, recovery,

and archiving

Symantec Enterprise Vault is an intelligent

software-based archiving platform that stores,

manages, and supports discovery of corporate

data from email, filer server, instant messaging

content management, and collaboration

environments. Enterprise Vault uses intelligent

classification engines to manage data,

improving a companys ability to retain and

protect corporate information while reducingstorage costs and simplifying management.

Veritas NetBackup delivers unified disk-

based management of data protection,

archiving, and recovery that scales to protect

the largest UNIX, Windows, Linux, and

NetWare environments. With complete

protection for remote offices and data

centers, NetBackup offers a single console

for management of all backup and recovery

operations. The centralized management

platform includes integrated data archiving,

migration, and retention to help meet

governance and compliance requirements.

Advanced backup and recovery reporting

supports service-level management for all

protected data.

Symantec Backup Exec is the gold standard

in Windows data recovery, delivering proven,

efficient, certified disk-to-disk-to-tape

backup and recovery for Windows-centric

environments. Continuous data protection

for Microsoft Exchange, SQL, file servers,

and workstations cuts backup windows

dramatically, and patent-pending granular

recovery for Exchange, SharePoint Server,

and Active Directory easily restores individual

emails, documents and user preferences in

seconds, from the same backup that protects

the full database. New integration of Symantec

Endpoint Protection, Enterprise Vault, Backup

Exec System Recovery, and Symantec Protection

Network Centers improves scalability and

simplifies security, backup, and archiving of

business-critical data.

1

Throughout this paper, backup is used to indicate both backup and associated recovery processes, and archiving includes search and discovery.

2

"National Economic Accounts: Private Fixed Investment in Equipment and Software by Type." Washington, DC: Bureau of Economic Analysis,Table 5.5.5U. November 2007.

3

Robert Amatruda. "Worldwide Tape Library 20072011 Forecast and Analysis: Avenue of Growth." Framingham, MA:International Data Corporation. August 2007.

4

Vangie Beal. The Year in Instant Messaging, Instant Messaging Planet. Darien, CT: Jupitermedia Corporation. December 21, 2006.http://www.instantmessagingplanet.com/enterprise/article.php/3650381

5

Paul Korzeniowski. Time to Guard Your Instant Messaging Traffic, bMighty.com. Manhasset, NY: CMP Media LLC. September 6, 2007.http://www.bmighty.com/blog/main/archives/2007/09/time_to_guard_y.html

Steps toward the future

Businesses understand the value of backup. Acknowledgingand acting onthe business value

of archiving is the first and most important step they can make toward better data protection and

storage management. Implementation of future-ready data-protection and storage-management

solutions should take account of trends that are already underway:

Prepare for the move to diskThe improving economics of disk storage make the transition

just a matter of time. The advantages of disk over tape for rapid consolidation, de-duplication,

visibility, and management are profound. Dont lock your organization out with a backward-facing solution.

Prepare for the rise of unstructured contentCompared with highly structured mission-

critical transaction databases, email archives and files look like a vast heap. But dont

underestimate that unstructured content: It contains your organizations intellectual property,

business relationships, plans, and innovations. Advanced archiving solutions can help you

manage itworking with your end users, not against them.

Prepare for e-discoveryLitigation and regulation are facts of business life. Reasonable

retention policies backed up by firm but employee-friendly archiving and expiration processes

not only cut costs and improve outcomes in discovery; they also offload burdens from backup

processes and storage infrastructure, for improved IT service levels at lower cost.


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For specific country offices and

contact numbers, please visit

our Web site. For product

information in the U.S., call

toll-free 1 (800) 745 6054.

Symantec Corporation

World Headquarters

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Cupertino, CA 95014 USA

+1 (408) 517 8000

1 (800) 721 3934

www.symantec.com

Copyright 2008 Symantec Corporation. All rightsreserved. Symantec, the Symantec Logo, Veritas, Backup

Exec, Endpoint Protection, Enterprise Vault, NetBackup,

and Symantec Protection Network are trademarks or

registered trademarks of Symantec Corporation or its

affiliates in the U.S. and other countries. Microsoft,

Windows, and SharePoint are either registered trade-

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States and/or other countries. Other names may be

trademarks of their respective owners.

Printed in the U.S.A.

04/08 13600558

About Symantec

Symantec is a global leader in

providing security, storage, and systems

management solutions to help business

and consumers secure and manage

their information. Headquartered

in Cupertino, Calif., Symantec has

operations in more than 40 countries.

More information is available at

www.symantec.com.