Laptop Backup - Recovery Requirements

This post is part of a Series on planning for laptop backup in your organization.  This post looks at key recovery requirements when considering a laptop backup solution.

There are 3 stakeholders when it comes to corporate data on a laptop: End Users, IT and Business/Legal.

When considering the recovery requirements, we need to consider the needs of all 3 stakeholders.  The following attempts to capture the various recovery requirements that are likely to be expected from a laptop backup solution at some point by one of these stakeholders:

• Self-service recovery: Most IT organizations trust their users to perform self-service recovery, but we still see some who don’t want self-service recovery, because they’ve been burnt in the past.  You should consider the following to ensure you can deliver a functional self-service recovery capability to end users:

1.  
   1. Single file recovery or full system rebuild: do you trust your users to recover individual files from their backup or are they savvy enough to recover their entire data also?
   2. Allowing end users to overwrite the files: Are there groups of users who have shown a propensity for performing hara-kiri? Whom you don’t want to give the ability to overwrite files?
   3. Web based recovery: Do you want to allow your end users to be able to recover data from a web browser? For times when they are not on their primary computer.
   4. Training end users: This often gets overlooked and causes lot of issues.  How much training do you need to perform for your end users?  Look for a solution that is integrated into the operating system tools like Windows Search and Explorer so they don’t have to learn anything new.

• Laptop rebuild model – Central depot vs. distributed sites: Do you have a central site where you intend to rebuild all laptops and then ship them to users at different sites? Or, do you have IT staff at remote sites who will be responsible for rebuilding laptops are for users at those sites?
• Migration in case of lease renewal: Do you intend to use the PC backup as a source for data migration in case of laptop renewal?
• Recovery Time Objective:
  1. How much time is acceptable for a laptop to be rebuilt?
  2. Are there requirements to give users access to their data almost immediately via a loaner laptop while their main laptop gets rebuilt?
  3. How long are users willing to wait for recovering a single file?
• Loaner machines: Do you have loaner machines which help users tide over the duration when their laptop is being rebuilt?  What data recovery requirements are imposed by loaner machines?
• Recovery to non-corporate devices: Do you need to explicitly disallow recovery to non-corporate devices to prevent data leakage?
• Bare metal recovery: Are you one of those brave souls who believes that bare metal recovery for PCs can work and are willing to tackle the myriad dissimilar hardware issues, or do you have a golden image model on top of which you intend to recover user data and settings?
• Recovery for E-Discovery or other forensics: is it likely that your legal or HR group will ask you for access to a user’s laptop data for E-Discovery or internal forensics.

I’ll tackle some of these in more detail in later blogs.