According to ABI Research, the market for business continuity and disaster recovery services is set to grow from the present $24.3 billion to $39 billion by 2015. Business continuity depends heavily on the business data that are increasingly stored on computers and networks. Business data is unique to each business; unlike physical facilities these cannot be replaced by buying them in the market.
If you lose your customer and receivables data for example, including the invoices and payments details needed to prove your claims, you might not be able to know who owes you what and recover the money from your debtors. Cases have been reported about businesses going bankrupt after they lost their data.
This is part one of the article, where we look at the data disaster scenario and recovery options. In part two, we will look at data protection scenario and what is involved in organizing a data recovery business.
Data Disasters
As we saw above, data is critical for continuing operations of the business. At the same time, data is vulnerable to loss from varied happenings:
Accidental deletion of files or formatting of drives
Data on the storage media becoming unreadable owing to hardware or software problems, or power fluctuations
Data being lost owing to malicious attacks of different types, such as viruses and deliberate erasure of data by disgruntled employees
Pilferage of storage media such as removable disks or laptop computers, or misplacing and being unable to locate them
Physical damage from natural disasters, individual accidents or a fire
The possibilities are so commonplace that it would be a wonder if you are able to completely escape the experience of losing your data.
Recovering Lost Data
"Lost" data is not always lost. For example, when you delete a file, only the index entry pointing to the locations of the data are removed. The data and the file remain intact until overwritten by new data. You can usually effect a complete data recovery if you have not done substantial further disk-writes after the deletion. Such data recovery can usually be done easily using a data recovery program that might come with the Operating System or that you get from a third party developer.
Even in the case of serious damage such as those caused by fire, flood or an accident like running over the laptop while backing up your car, the data can often be recovered completely by availing the services of specialist data recovery service providers.
The option of trying to reconstruct the data from original documents, provided these are kept on paper which are still available, is also there. However, even if all data can thus be reconstructed from paper documents, the exercise is going to take a great deal of time and money, and also put the business out of operation till the systems are up and running again. By that time many customers might have found other suppliers. Reconstruction in this manner is not a feasible option.
Data Recovery Procedures
Professional data recovery agencies can look at the problem and identify the best option to be used for recovering lost data. For example they might use data recovery software tailored to the platform on which the data was created. Or they might go for hardware procedures working in a dust-free clean room. Typically they capture the raw image left on the damaged disk onto a new media, and work with these. In the case of RAID systems, data recovery might occasionally need expert engineers who can rebuild the disk array.
In part two of this article, we will look at the options available for protecting your data, and also how to organize a data recovery business to tap a fast growing market, if you have what it takes.
Gopinathan has several decades of business experience and now focuses on publishing the Emerging Technologies Magazine that explores the business opportunities offered by emerging technologies such as nanotechnology, biotechnology and information technology, and also on providing small business mentoring services through his personal website http://www.tgopinathan.com.
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