Protect your data warehouse

Does your disaster recovery plan include your data warehouse? If it doesn't, you are facing a critical gap that could cost you years of saved data and lots of trouble. Now that data warehousing is increasingly tied to mission-critical applications such as business intelligence, you had better be sure that the mass of data that your office has collected is secure and that it is protected in event of a power outage, a hurricane or any other disaster that could wipe the system out.

"Data warehousing and business intelligence did start out as being not mission critical," said Claudia Imhoff, president and founder of Intelligent Solutions, a Boulder, Colo., consulting firm. "People would extract data out of the operational system and run away into their own environment, completely separated from operations. But in the past 10 years, analytics have become quite critical."

There are many questions about how to treat a data warehouse, including whether it should be absorbed into the IT infrastructure. "The litmus test here is whether a data warehouse becomes so mission critical that when it goes down, people begin to have problems. Then you want to move it into a data center operation. In a lot of cases, those data centers already exist, and they are more than happy to provide an environment for you with 24-by-7 backup and restore and all that,'' Wayne Eckerson, director of research at The Data Warehousing Institute in Renton, Wash., told SearchCIO.This is one more must-do item on the CIO list to make the IT department stronger. CIOs should be asking themselves, "Where would my company be if this data is lost?"

For more you data warehouses:
- See this SearchCIO article