Data Backup and Storage Compliance, How Do Smaller Companies Achieve This?

Companies must account and deal for new legislationsignificant time and cost savings in tape management.
governing how information is stored on IT systems.Interestingly, product features were far more
The EU is shortly to adopt many of theimportant than the brand of the product, with 82%
recommendations on corporate governance set outof organisations making a decision based on product
by the Sarbanes-Oxley Act in the US, UK firms arefeatures. When it came to the decision of choosing a
to be expected to deal with and manage explicitspecialist storage supplier or a general IT provider for
guidelines on how to store email and otherstorage solutions there was a very slight preference
documents on their IT systems. IT managers shouldfor specialised storage suppliers (51%) over general
consider the necessary procedures and technologiesIT providers (49%).
needed for compliance now, in order ensureThis survey shows that compliance with regulations is
technology is able to deal with the new legislation.a key driver in companies' storage security policy and
Regulations regarding data storage at the momentthat we are likely to see more companies deploying
are fairly lax, but there will be a huge increase in theDisk to Disk to Tape technology in the future.
amount of data than must be held over the next 18All the above is fine if you are a corporate, you have
months to two years.an annual IT budget of £500,000 and
Email archiving, the increased use of expensivenumerous members of staff who can plan and
write-once read-many media, information lifecyclecomplete such a system. Is it very easy to talk
management and content-aware storage as a few ofabout SANs, NAS's Virtual Tape Libraries.
the technologies which firms should consider for theOrganisations of this nature already have a very
future, though in some cases companies will simplystable and flexible infrastructure, where it is
need to improve the way they manage existingcomparably easier to implement such a system.
systems.What about the 1000's of smaller companies such as
It is anticipated that new legislations will demand thatsolicitors, accountants, medical practices and
an organizations' archiving solutions must guaranteemanufactures etc, which may have only 2 servers on
that the information they hold has not been changed,site, but still have the same reliance on data and
and keep it for a specific period of time beforehave to adhere to the same legislations? Backup to
automatically deleting it.tape is an option, however, there is an upfront cost
A survey of 493 companies in the UK has shownand a requirement for a trusted member of staff to
that compliance with regulations has a high or fairlytake the tapes off site every night and store in a
significant impact on the data storage strategies ofsafe place. Can you guarantee your backup has
87% of the organisations surveyed. Back-up andworked, and do you really trust your long term data
recovery was also very important to the dataon magnetic media? Another option is to archive your
protection strategy of 93% of organisations.data onto optical devices, however the cost is even
78% of organisations future storage strategy is setmore prohibitive than tape and you still need to take
to include Disk-to-Disk-to-Tape technology. This maythe disk offsite.
be due to the highly affordable and flexible nature ofNo doubt your data is growing quickly; recently
this new technology. For example, recentenforced legislations makes sure of this, so why not
deployments of disk-to-disk-to-tape (D2D2T)employ a backup and archival solution which has no
solutions by various companies have, on average,upfront cost, is fully automated, secure and
reduced the backup window by more than 70%,regardless of disaster will ensure your data is always
from fifteen hours to less than four, yieldingavailable, Offsite Backup.