Best Practices for Best Practices for Mission-Critical Applications
Yet, despite being mission-critical, such systems still lack the proper infrastructure to ensure data protection and availability. That's why organizations need to look beyond image processing to focus on scalability and data protection as well.
Scalability Is Key
Financial services organizations require a completely scalable content infrastructure to ensure they can handle the high volume of users, and huge numbers of images and documents typically seen in document and image processing applications.
XML-based, object-oriented repositories can manage virtually limitless volumes of unstructured information. And repositories in true enterprise content management systems can be deployed in several ways to support high-scalability requirements. For instance, multiple repositories can be serviced by a single content server, or multiple content servers can service one or more repositories. Such content repositories should be capable of being deployed with a distributed architecture, bringing content closer to users without giving up content consistency and central management. Replicating content between multiple physical repositories enables organizations to treat a set of repositories as a single entity, significantly lowering administration efforts and increasing ease of use.
Content services and other add-on products should be scalable as well. Through vertical scalability, users can take advantage of multi-processor server systems, constantly raising performance by adding CPU capacity. Horizontal scalability enables users to leverage the combined performance of multiple server systems running content management software in a cluster as well. Now let's take a look at data protection.
Protection Really Means Recovery
The principal goal of data protection is fast, reliable recovery. This new strategic approach—called recovery management—combines backup, replication, continuous data protection (CDP), analytics and reporting and management services in a comprehensive, integrated solution. Recovery management maps protection and recovery services to the business value of an application or file at a particular point in time.
Of course, proper backup is important. But as many as 60% of backups do not complete successfully, which means organizations devote a lot of time and resources to troubleshooting. And backup technology often doesn't scale well, adapt to changes in business requirements and network infrastructure, or deliver the timely, meaningful reporting necessary to develop efficient data-growth and related recovery strategies.
In short, a backup-centric protection model cannot deal effectively with the business complexity of an always-on, growing digital world.
A recovery-centric protection model, on the other hand, takes a broader, more-holistic view, and is independent of specific functional technologies. A different way of thinking about protection, recovery management supports the speed demands of financial services. (Even in less time-sensitive business operations such as regulatory compliance, firms are still required to demonstrate rapid data "presentation.")
In short, business demands are compelling recovery to become ever faster, more granular, and more comprehensive.
The Recovery Management Framework
Of course, without protection there is no data to recover. So recovery management applies several technologies based on the information's business value.
- Backup: Any copy of original data is a backup, whether created through mirroring, replication, continuous data protection, traditional tape-based processes, etc.
- Replication: Hardware- and software-based replication technologies produce data copies almost in real time. Replication is usually associated with high-level, disaster-oriented recovery planning.
- Continuous data protection: Automatically saves a copy of every change made to data, enabling object-level data (such as files, mail boxes, and messages) to be restored to any point in time. No backup schedules are required.
A recovery management solution should provide a unified view of protection and recovery activities, giving administrators deep insight into, and powerful control over, the present and future state of their recovery infrastructure. Administrators can track the performance of protection schemes, allocate protection resources, log and respond to data events, initiate recovery activities, oversee SLAs and more. At the same time, service-level policies ensure that applications and information consistently receive appropriate protections.
Analytics and modeling functionality are also important, enabling IT teams to conduct detailed gap analysis in the application environment, identify potential recovery failures, determine the root cause of historical failures and model the potential change impact of recoverability over time.
Recovery management strategies must be flexible and able to adapt to a variety of changing business requirements—not just outages or natural disasters. For example, a new product launch can boost the customer service group's need for data access, regulatory and compliance demands will evolve over time, and corporate governance expectations can alter retention policies.
Overall storage resource management capabilities—which can most efficiently handle the intricate interplay between software, hardware, and personnel found in tiered networked storage within an ILM infrastructure—are also critical to ensure continuous data availability.
Bringing It All Together
Image and document processing has quietly become mission critical to the financial services industry. Accordingly, it warrants the same protections afforded the rest of your mission-critical systems. Recovery management is the key. For your organization to become truly recovery-centric, application and protection gaps must be permanently closed, recovery SLAs must be established and the right technologies perpetually matched with the right data. Clearly, an integrated, end-to-end business process management system is the way to go.
Paper Management Costs
The typical financial services organization makes 19 copies of a single document. Then....
- Spends $20 to file each document;
- Loses one out of every 20 documents;
- Devotes 25 hours to recreating each lost document;
- Spends $120 searching for each misfiled document; and
- Spends $8 to process every invoice (70% for document handling).
EMC Corporation (NYSE: EMC) is the world leader in products, services and solutions for information management and storage that help organizations extract the maximum value from their information, at the lowest total cost, across every point in the information lifecycle. Information about EMC's products and services can be found at
www.emc.com