The Top Causes Of Data Disaster

Any company that is serious about staying in business will formulate emergency response plans for a wide variety of situations

. Obviously, the emergency telephone number for the fire department and local law enforcement agencies will be prominently posted. The numbers for EMS and hospital services are kept close at hand as well.

Knowing what emergencies are possible always helps when formulating a disaster plan. Once that the possible emergencies are known, the response plan is more easily defined. In physical or medical emergency planning, these are usually determined easily.

However, the company should also formulate an emergency response plan for data disasters as well. In a recent survey by Info-Tech, the top data disaster causes were identified. Armed with this information, a business will be able to create an effective plan for file recovery and protection.

Interestingly, natural disasters account for only five percent of all data loss. Therefore, lets concentrate on the most predominant dangers to business data.

Software failures account for approximately 24 percent of all data loss. These failures can be the result of virus and malware attacks, file corruption and even software updates. If you have an IT department, be sure to include them in your disaster planning, which should include software protection.

Hardware failures came in at number two in the survey, responsible for around 21 percent of data loss disasters. Physical failures in hardware come from normal wear and tear, electronic failures and voltage spikes, just to name a few. Drives that exhibit signs of physical failure should be shut down and replaced immediately if possible. This is another case where the companys IT department should be involved.

However, hard drive data recovery in physical failures normally requires the services of a professional data retrieval lab. In many instance of physical failure, the hard drive must be opened. This is a task that requires trained, qualified recovery engineers and a specialized environment. Class 100/ISO 5 cleanrooms are necessary to protect drives from airborne contaminants and the equipment is expensive to obtain and maintain properly.

Depending on the array configuration, RAID data recovery can be complicated and all data on the server is at risk, even if only one drive fails. Unless an IT member has been fully trained in the process, RAID recovery should be left to the professionals as well.

External Network failures and power outages round out the major causes of data disasters. Fail-safe measures should be in place to guard against these types of failures. For example, computers and servers should be protected by a uninterruptible power supply, called a UPS. Individual desktop computer can be outfitted with a UPS relatively cheaply and this gives the user time to shut down the computer before files are lost.

Servers will require a larger alternate power source, but the expense is offset by the data protection afforded.

by: Jennifer Bell

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