I recently authored an article for CMSWire discussing the importance of information governance as it relates to data protection.
Regardless of its size, every business must have a suitable solution for data protection. They must protect their information to lessen risk of loss or corruption, but doing this comes with some questions: How long does a document need to be retained? Where should it be stored? Who should or should not have access to it?
Data protection plans can be complicated to create and there are different factors to consider. These factors include:
Identification and classification
Before implementing any data protection plan, it is important to understand your current environment through identification and classification. There are two approaches to doing this:
- Reactive: This approach focuses on reporting and can be quite cumbersome due to the level of research required.
- Proactive: The key to this approach is putting the correct controls and policies in place so that priority is applied as content is generated.
Planning Backups
Backup planning begins following classification. In order to ensure information protection is catered to your specific needs, there are three strategies:
- Precision: For high-traffic sites and high-value, rapidly changing content, the backup window needs to be as small as possible to ensure the most up-to-date information is protected.
- Component: By necessity, SharePoint components and databases demand a longer backup window as there is simply more data to back up than file level backups. Because the change rate is lower, these components do not require the same frequency as the high priority items.
- Wide net: For servers or virtual machines, changes are even less frequent. In a total loss situation, rebuilding a host from scratch is going to take time. If these components are protected and a failover farm is available, the environment can be restored more quickly, but that requires an investment in hardware that is not active.
Assessment of these factors will help you construct information governance solutions with a sharper eye and find a solution that suits the needs of your business.
To read more about formulating a proper data protection plan that aligns with information governance initiatives, please visit CMSWire.
Find out how AvePoint can help you proactively protect your organization’s content according to specific business needs through comprehensive solutions for SharePoint governance and SharePoint backup.
