Data Protection: Ensuring Data Availability, 2nd Edition

The second edition of Data Protection goes beyond the traditional topics including deduplication, continuous availability, snapshots, replication, backup and recovery, and explores such additional considerations as legal, privacy, and ethical issues. A new model is presented for understanding and planning the various aspects of data protection, which is essential to developing holistic strategies. The second edition also addresses the Cloud and the growing adoption of software and function as a service, as well as effectively planning over the lifespan of a workload what the best mix of traditional, and cloud native data protection services might be. Virtualization continues to present new challenges to data protection, and the impact of containerization is examined.

The book takes a holistic, business-based approach to data protection. It explains how data protection is a mix of proactive and reactive planning, technology and activities that allow for data continuity. There are three essential activities that refer to themselves as data protection; while they all overlap in terms of scope and function, each operate as reasonably self-contained fields with their own specialists and domain nomenclature.

These three activities are:
• Data protection as a storage and recovery activity
• Data protection as a security activity
• Data protection as a privacy activity

These activities are covered in detail, with a focus on how organizations can use them to leverage their IT investments and optimize costs. The book also explains how data protection is becoming an enabler for new processes around data movement and data processing.

This book arms readers with information critical for making decisions on how data can be protected against loss in the cloud, on-premises, or in a mix of the two. It explains the changing face of recovery in a highly virtualized data center and techniques for dealing with big data. Moreover, it presents a model for where data recovery processes can be integrated with IT governance and management in order to achieve the right focus on recoverability across the business.