Issue link: https://epubs.iltanet.org/i/4636
ILTA White Paper Infrastructure Technologies 40 L egal IT professionals today are in a bind. Protecting growing amounts of electronically stored information and the systems they reside on presents an enormous challenge for resource- constrained IT departments. The challenge deepens when the bridges of the information systems they are charged with protecting stretch between a law firm and its remote offices around the nation or the globe. The traditional method of relying on tape-based backups to protect firm and client data means transporting and storing tapes offsite. Recovering systems and data when needed consumes time and resources. IT faces the risk of not knowing whether critical data can be recovered until after a disaster. Some best practices allow legal IT departments to protect their critical systems and case-related files and information while choosing a data backup and disaster recovery (DR) solution that does more with less. • Integrate System and Data Protection Protecting an entire system might be more critical to business than the important task of protecting firm and client data. If an entire system goes down, how long and what steps are needed to restore it? Is recovering the data an additional time-consuming step, or is it integrated into the entire recovery process? An ideal solution automates system and data recovery by integrating the steps into a single-pass, guided procedure. It should provide the flexibility to restore to the same system, a new system or a virtual environment. • Centralize Your Administration Ensure that your law firm can manage backups and recoveries centrally for the entire physical and virtual environment anytime and anywhere via a Web browser for all systems including servers, applications, desktops and laptops. That means you no longer have to rely on end users to save data located on hard drives in disparate systems throughout your network. It also frees untrained staff at local offices from performing backup tasks and lets them focus on running your firm. • Prepare for Disaster with a Cloud-Based DR Service A regional or site-wide disaster can shut down operations long enough to threaten a firm's credibility and survival. Large companies typically have the resources to create redundant data centers or hot carine blanchet i365, a seagate company Best Practices for Protecting Data