By Alyson Langon, Product Marketer, EMC Backup Recovery Systems

In the wake of Hurricane Sandy, businesses throughout the Northeast, particularly New York and New Jersey, are still struggling to assess the damage and get back to business as usual.  With one of their most valuable assets compromised–their information— hopefully they are prepared with a solid disaster recovery plan.

For years, the standard disaster recovery (DR) plan consisted of shipping backup tapes to an off-site location and hoping to get them back in the event of a disaster.  This taped-based DR strategy was expensive, time consuming and unreliable. Thanks to deduplication technology, you can now backup and replicate information more quickly and efficiently on disk.  However, deduplication alone is not enough for an effective DR solution – you need a solution that focuses on providing reliable recovery as well as efficient replication.

It’s critical you feel confident that your backup solution can effectively recover from the DR site should your primary site go down.  When/if disaster strikes, the last thing you want to worry about is if you’ll be able to recover your data.  Unfortunately, like disasters before it, the damage and loss caused by Hurricane Sandy may be a wakeup call that reliable DR is critical to all businesses.  If you haven’t already, it is time to start asking yourself: “How do I know I will be able to recover?”

The only way to be completely confident that your data is recoverable is to make sure it is stored on a system that prioritizes data integrity and recovery above all else.  Otherwise, your data will be at risk.  The Data Domain Data Invulnerability Architecture will give you that confidence by providing successive lines of defense against all sources of errors and corruption.  It first verifies data as it’s written to the system to ensure it is stored correctly.  Then, the system will continuously detect errors and correct them before they become a problem to ensure data stays correct.  Finally, upon recovery, the system will again verify the integrity of the data, so you can be sure the data you’re recovering is correct (read more about how this works on a recent blog).  This ensures that your backup data is always available for reliable recovery locally or remotely. This is the kind of peace of mind you should have when backing up and replicating your information. Because, as Sandy has shown us, a disaster striking is a real threat.

My thoughts are with everyone affected by Sandy’s devastation.  If you are able, please donate to the Red Cross to aid in relief efforts.

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