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Inheriting issues

Editorial Type: Opinion     Date: 07-2015    Views: 2254      





There are a number of options available to an organisation looking to effectively manage legacy backup migration, says Paul le Messurier, Programme and Operations Manager at Kroll Ontrack - but the 'do-nothing option' is not recommended

The management of legacy data has become a critical business issue for organisations both large and small across all industry sectors. Knowing what data you own, where it is stored and how to access it quickly in the face of regulatory or legal investigations is now a vital element of day-to-day information management and corporate governance.

Think about the recent challenges faced by the financial services sector, for example, including PPI mis-selling and price fixing cartels - organisations are required to search for documents including emails or documents from years before.

The question of how to manage and access data on legacy backup tapes when reviewing your backup strategy or upgrading, replacing or consolidating your backup infrastructure requires very careful consideration. The same applies when inheriting archive backup tapes as a result of a merger and acquisition. In our experience, there are five options available to organisations, each with its own advantages and disadvantages:

1. Maintain the legacy backup software infrastructure in case the company has a request to find specific data for compliance, regulatory or legal reasons. This will incur software licence and annual maintenance costs over a period of years, possibly until retention date expiry, just in case the company needs to restore data for whatever reason.

The company will need to ensure it retains staff with experience in the legacy backup software infrastructure that is used. Time taken to receive, mount and restore the tapes themselves take up additional resources, especially when investigations highlight additional complications when it is unclear what is on which tapes. And all the time internal staff are working on restoring data from legacy tapes, there is an opportunity cost where they are not available to work on other projects or operational tasks.

The maintenance costs of dealing with older tape drives and ensuring they are operable also need to be built into this first scenario, along with the replacement of hardware that has failed and is only noted when restore jobs are undertaken.

This approach introduces an additional risk that data cannot be restored in time to meet regulatory or legal requests due to antiquated back-up infrastructure, degraded tapes or missing skills.

2. Use commercial software tools that allow IT to migrate and manage legacy tapes. This approach removes the need for legacy backup software and infrastructure and experienced staff who can operate the legacy system. However, this option will incur software licence and annual maintenance costs for the software tools as well as resources to operate the software. The process will become more complex if a variety of backup solutions or versions have been used over the years.

3. Employ managed data services to transfer and migrate to an outsourced archiving centre. In this case the company will hand the archived backup tapes to a service provider who will transfer data or content into their archiving centre. The company then can request a restore of specific data from the outsourced service provider. This takes the problem off the hands of the company and also avoids the cost of legacy backup infrastructure. It will incur costs for the outsourced service provider ingesting data off the backup tapes into the archive centre as well as on-going hosting costs. This option may not be suitable for companies who have highly sensitive data that they do not want to leave their premises and their control.

4. Choose tape processing services to catalogue and extract data from the legacy backup tapes. This will involve a specialist provider possibly creating a catalogue of the tapes or converting the legacy backup software catalogue into a standard format. From that point the company can request ad-hoc services from the specialist provider to restore data from backup tapes as and when required. Alternatively the company can sign a multi-year service agreement with the specialist provider for a certain number of restores a year. The specialist provider may also be able to host the catalogue giving the company access to search through the catalogue using a web browser. This avoids the cost of legacy backup infrastructure and the company pays for only the number of tape restores they need. Using a tape restoration service means companies can avoid many of the risks and costs involved in other scenarios, because data can be restored from archive tapes regardless of back-up software used or even the tape type.

5. Of course there is the fifth and final option of doing nothing. Don't go for any of the above options and hope the company does not have to restore any data from any of its legacy backup tapes. However if companies are required to provide data for whatever reason they will need to find a solution very quickly, which may be difficult and very expensive. Or else they will risk the possibility of facing some type of sanction for not being able to provide data for regulatory or legal reasons.
More info: www.krollontrack.co.uk

"Knowing what data you own, where it is stored and how to access it quickly in the face of regulatory or legal investigations is now a vital element of day-to-day information management and corporate governance. Think about the recent challenges faced by the financial services sector, for example, including PPI mis-selling and price fixing cartels - organisations are required to search for documents including emails or documents from years before."

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