Archived data, the forgotten child of disaster recovery plans.
In the digital world that we live in today, one thing that we can be certain about is that time is not on our side, especially when it comes to disaster. With more and more industry’s transitioning to a digital approach, the worlds data is growing exponentially. In fact, it is estimated that by 2025 cloud storage will amount to over 200 zettabytes of data. Hard to wrap your head around how much data that is? It’s the equivalent to giving every person on the planet 90 iPhones with 256g storage each. That’s why now more than ever, with cybercrimes increasing every year, efficient backup restoration in essential.
The case
In October 2021, one of Framewerx’s client experienced every business’ worst nightmare; a zero-day ransomware attack effected by an active hacking group. Thankfully a solid disaster recovery plan had been put into place. Within 6 working hours, Framewerx had isolated the incident and had the primary production data back And within 72 hours the client was fully operational again. However, one thing that hadn’t been accounted for in our disaster recovery plan was archived data.
As a result, Framewerx had to engage the backups through hard drives and the cloud. Framewerx reached out to a vendor who specialized in backup and disaster recovery, and the vendor provided a script that would search through the files linearly. The provided script would get the job done, but with approximately forty million files to go through, it would take seven years to comb through all the data. Understandably the client does not have the luxury of waiting seven years for their data to be recovered. Searching for a singular file this way could take several minutes, or several days.
The magic is in the indexing.
The solution
Ben Alsfeld, one of Framewerx’s senior IT technicians, started working on modifying the script that the vendor provided. Within one week, by creating a data base of indices, he effectively reduced the search time by 75%. Coupled with parallel processing, he further reduced the script time. And in seven days, the predicted recovery time went from seven years to twenty-three days, a 99.9% time reduction.
Most businesses do not think to include archived backups in their disaster recovery plans, after all once they are saved and stored what’s to worry about, right? But having that data and being able to locate it are two very different things. The thing about our digital world is that it is constantly changing. That is why at Framewerx, we now emphasize including archived data in our clients disaster recovery plans. Time may not be on your side, but we are.
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