Data backup and recovery focus follows Thailand floods

Recent months have witnessed an uptick in the data backup and recovery implementations among companies whose operations were wiped out by the devastating fall floods in Thailand, according to a recent report from the Bangkok Post.

While it's encouraging that these organizations are preparing themselves for future incidents, others around the world should learn from the example and begin taking a more proactive approach to data protection.

"Managing large-volume data, improving efficiency of backup storage infrastructure and enhancing disaster recovery readiness were the top three reasons given by Thai respondents for wanting to increase their investments," the Bangkok Post reported, referencing a recent poll of companies in the region.

The historic flooding suffered across Southeast Asia had a profound effect on the region's rich manufacturing industry. In fact, the extent of the damage and the downtime it caused forced many analysts to slash their 2012 estimates for areas like the PC industry.

While there is little to nothing that can be done to combat the effects of Mother Nature, focusing on data backup and recovery before an incident strikes will prepare an organization to weather the worst of a storm - both literally and figuratively. Returning data and operations to working order as quickly as possible is a key area that can be addressed by backup.

Organizations today have many options available, with some of the more popular ones being offsite tape storage and the cloud. Some companies are even leveraging the best of both new and traditional technologies to ensure their mission-critical information is as protected as possible.

In combining tape and the cloud for example, IT decision-makers can lean on the former for long-term archiving of information and utilize the latter for the data that must be readily accessible at all times and recovered first following an incident. Doing so ensures that everything thing from the compliance requirements bestowed on an organization to its reputation among partners and customers is addressed and prioritized.

Fortunately, it appears that many organization may already be focusing their efforts to improve their data backup and recovery strategies and programs. According to a recent update to IDC's report, Worldwide Purpose-Built Backup Appliance 2011–2015 Forecast, growth in the sector that became evident in 2011 is expected to continue moving forward.

Last year, the market reached $2.8 billion, IDC said. Its analysts had initially thought the figure would be closer to $2.1 billion.