The smarter side of data backup

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reports will ensure that sound inventory management practices are applied.

IT departments must provide accurate, auditable reports that measure backup performance against internal service-level agreements and verify requirements from continuous improvement frameworks.

Yet, meeting recovery time objective (RTO) and recovery point objective (RPO) requirements is easier said than done, and proving it is even more difficult. The same is true for complying with—as well as validating compliance with—such external regulations as Sarbanes-Oxley, Gramm-Leach-Bliley, the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), California Senate Bill 1386, and much more.

Business-focused reporting addresses the three common measures for compliance reporting and data protection: RPO, success rate, and verification. Reports can be used to measure a service level and understand RPO exposure by application such as Oracle or Microsoft Exchange. These same reports can be automatically emailed to key stakeholders such as database administrators or CXO’s. Other reports can be used to quickly compare critical application success rates so that improvements can be made in environments that are falling short and not meeting established service level agreements.

These and additional reports can also be used to prove to auditors that IT is executing on its stated backup strategy and actively addressing compliance issues.

Most organisations would agree that backup and other IT processes should be run as a business. But defining just what that means may vary from one business to the next.

Nevertheless, virtually every organisation is likely to point to cost savings as an indication of a backup operation that is conducted as a business. Running backup operations in this manner promotes cost savings by enabling the proactive management of IT operations with the business, providing a mechanism to achieve cost analysis and chargeback to business units or customers, and, in some cases, delivering a model for managed service providers.

To that end, business-focused reporting makes it easy for IT to view data in the context of the business and a specific audience, whether by geography, application, operating system, data centre, customer, business unit, service tier, and more. In fact, reports can be generated that tabulate backup costs by line of business, thereby aligning data protection with the organisation and even providing a means to influence consumer behaviour.