Risk management: Know your storage risks

At the highest level, an enterprise risk management program would consider elements such as market demand, competition and the state of the economy to be business risks. Operational risks are also considered and business resilience, or the ability to resume business in the event of a disaster, is normally included. This is where business continuity and IT disaster recovery plans (DRP) come into play.

Every good DRP should always be based on a recovery strategy that was defined prior to developing the plan itself (hence the term planning). The ideal recovery strategy is not pulled out of a hat, but rather is based on the understanding of the threats to which our IT environment is exposed, its vulnerabilities, the probability of occurrence and the impact to the organization. This essentially summarizes the IT risk assessment process.

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in the specifics of qualifying or quantifying risk, let's examine some of those risks. It should be noted that the following list is by no means exhaustive or complete but is merely a starting point. Risk can vary widely based on geography, climate, level of preparedness, corporate culture and more.

Backup storage and the risks involved

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Disk storage and the risks involved

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Obviously, IT environments are subject to many more internal or external threats that can indirectly affect storage and an attempt at listing them all would exceed the scope of this tip. Some examples include power conditioning, environmental controls, physical security and data integrity. There are a number of publications available on storage best practices and this site offers a lot valuable advice on the subject. Hopefully, this tip will have helped get the thought process started.

About the author: Pierre Dorion is a certified business continuity professional for Mainland Information Systems Inc.

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