Challenges of Education Data Disaster Recovery
Educational organizations depend upon on-demand data systems as the lifeblood of business operations, from student and faculty records to professional research and content, to administrative applications and much more. Loss of data can prove costly for institutes of education, such as the loss of laptop or desktop data for staff and faculty or database servers containing records, exams, or research data. In general, while the term “disaster recovery” typically invokes the image of a network-wide loss of data, in reality it is localized data losses that are not only disastrous but are easily preventable.
Institutes of higher education can also be left crippled when the limits of their data protection strategy are abruptly exposed. During 2005’s historical hurricane season, one major university whose campus was left underwater by Hurricane Katrina learned the hard way. School administrators were forced to personally collect backup tapes from their offsite storage facility, which resided in a flooded area of the city, by boat. No contingency plan was in place to restore IT infrastructure under the circumstances within a meaningful timeframe, and it was months before the university’s systems came back online.
Tape Backup Provides Incomplete, Unreliable Data Protection
In a distributed computing environment such as a wide network across campuses and remote offices, tape backup is traditionally used to protect only data residing on application servers and mission-critical machines, leaving network desktop and laptop data either relying on varying interdepartmental IT practices or, worse yet, completely unprotected. The outdated tape backup format dictates this limited scope of data protection, and in addition carries inherent risk even for protected machines:
- Tape backup is unreliable, with recovery failure rates as high as 20% to 50%
- Backup tapes are physically vulnerable to damage or theft
- Tape backup is costly to administer, with labor-intensive backup and recovery
When it comes to the data protection needs of education professionals, tape backup simply doesn’t meet the requirements of organizations that may have many offices in multiple departments and campuses with vital information.
Best Practice For Education Data Backup & Recovery
A complete disaster recovery strategy for educational organizations provides protection not only for mission-critical systems but also for remote computing environments, including laptop and desktop data. CRC DataProtection provides this degree of fine control over data protection with enterprise-class online backup technology delivered affordably and efficiently.
Unlike other backup systems, CRC’s Enterprise Data Backup & Recovery doesn’t require you to install and run software on each and every protected machine. Instead, you manage backup & recovery tasks from a single administration point for as many machines as you want on an area network. CRC’s online backup transfers data from a variety of machines to a fully disaster-hardened, redundant data storage facility:
In additional, all transfer of data offsite is optimized with both incremental backup and AES encryption and file compression, to save network resources and bandwidth while providing complete security against any interception of data in transit.
If you’re an individual or organization operating in the education industry and wish to implement a more reliable disaster recovery strategy while reducing administrative costs, contact us today. Evaluate our service, and we’ll show you just how easy it is to guarantee that your most valuable business asset - information - is always available, no matter what.
