IBM White Paper Sample

There are many risks that can threaten your remote data (see Figure 3). First, there is the simple and all-too-often case of someone losing a file or e-mail, usually through human error; it may be through an accidental deletion or a deliberate act by a disgruntled employee.

Another common risk is a malicious attack by a virus, worm or hacker. This can result in immediate loss of data, or the gradual and difficult-to-detect corruption of your data. To recover from this type of threat, you need to be able to roll back your systems to a point in time before the attack started. Disk and server crashes pose another threat, requiring specialized tools, talent and time in order to rebuild a disk or a server quickly and avoid business losses.

Local disasters include fire, flood and other events that can make the office and its systems unusable for some period of time. If the data in the office is destroyed, you would need an off-site copy of the data—and the ability to restore it—in order to resume operations. Finally, there are regional outages such as power blackouts and hurricanes. To recover from these types of disasters, you need backup facilities, systems, data and, in some cases, additional personnel in order to get back in business. Now consider each of these data loss threats in the context of each of your prioritized applications. What is your planned response for each threat, based on each application or data type?