EMC advises regional enterprises on intelligent data protection for second half 2006

EMC executives have put together four suggested best practices for Middle East companies to implement intelligent data protection, and are working with customers and partners in markets such as Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and the UAE to put these policies into practice.

According to EMC, the summer months are an ideal time for companies to 'healthcheck' their data storage strategies. To implement intelligent data protection, an enterprise should:

1. Prioritize - Classify company information to ensure that the most critical information receives priority. Data classification and assessment across the enterprise is a large project, but it provides a roadmap for disaster recovery requirements in case systems fail, and how long certain types of information need to be retained.

2. Recover - Use disk technology that enables fast recovery for business-critical applications such as email or customer-related information.

3. Comply - Clearly understand what your company's compliance requirements are - government, industry, corporate governance or litigation. Enterprises in the Middle East must be prepared for different types of information compliance based on new regulations coming online, and corporate IT should build storage management strategies around differing compliance requirements.

4. Separate - Detach the concepts of information backup and recovery from archiving. Use backup and recovery for disaster recovery and operational recovery in case systems fail, and archiving for lifecycle management, retention periods, discovery and compliance.

'Middle East decision-makers now have the opportunity to proactively protect their business-critical information. It's a balance that companies in the region are working to get right - creating data management policies that give employees the information access they need, while extracting business value and ensuring compliance requirements are met for all data,'

said Mohammed Amin, managing director for EMC Middle East.

'We're offering regional companies the global best practices that can enable them to achieve more intelligent data protection. EMC believes that by implementing an information lifecycle management (ILM) strategy on a tiered storage infrastructure, customers in the Middle East can manage data with optimal cost/performance based on the data's value, retrieval and retention requirements throughout its lifecycle,' he added.

Within EMC's vision for ILM, individual pieces of data are treated differently according to its contents, associated application, stage of life, compliance requirements and business value. This process includes evaluating the different requirements for operational recovery, disaster recovery and archiving.