9Antivirus

The devastating hurricanes of 2005 have taught businesses along the Gulf Coast of the United States one painful lesson, disaster recovery (DR) and protection of vital business data should not be ignored. A Disaster Recovery (DR) plan traditionally refers to a document covering restoration of technology systems and services and voice and data communications following an incident. Some organisations have a high-level DR plan covering the overall recovery approach with a number of disaster recovery procedures written at a detailed, technical level for use in rebuilding systems, services etc.

However, organizations must consider how their antivirus software can impact the viability of their DR plans. Antivirus software can have a substantial impact on a disaster recovery plan. Failure to plan properly for this issue can cause the failure of your DR plan–or worse, it can perpetuate a disaster all by itself.
The only way to prevent a virus that sneaks through your shield from wiping out your entire business is to create point-in-time data copies and store them in a safe place.

Antivirus software itself can impact your organization’s disaster recovery strategy in two ways: during normal operation or in the event of a failover. When systems are in normal operational order, you may employ antivirus software on both the primary and backup systems. On the primary systems, make sure the antivirus software doesn’t cause any conflicts with replication tools, backup systems, and point-in-time versioning tools. Most software vendors make sure their software won’t interfere with antivirus tools, so this isn’t typically a big issue.

On backup systems, however, replication tools may conflict with antivirus software. This isn’t the fault of either piece of software; rather, it’s a consequence of the normal operation of both. An option is to use more powerful servers on the backup side, which could handle the increased activity.

While, the extended list of tasks of backup must be completed with total accuracy to assure restoration of the right data at the right point-in-time.

A point in time recovery is restoring a database to a specified date and time. When you have completed a point in time recovery, your database will be in the state it was at the specific date and time you identified when restoring your database. A point in time recovery is a method to recover your database to any point in time since the last database backup.

In order to perform a point in time recovery you will need to have an entire series of backups (complete, differential, and transaction log backups) up to and/or beyond the point in time in which you want to recover. If you are missing any backups, or have truncated the transaction log without first performing a transaction log backup, then you will not be able to perform a point in time recovery.

If you want near-real time off-site backup, an online backup service is the way to go. For a reasonable fee all types of businesses are entrusting their data to travel across the Internet and storage of that data in a remote location. Online remote backup has advantages over traditional backup solutions, its security features are often better than most in house data security and it can mitigate risks and threats to your critical data.

Posted in News | May 30th, 2009 |