Why data Protection Important
 

Data protection is the process of safeguarding important information from corruption, compromise or loss.

The importance of data protection increases as the amount of data created and stored continues to grow at unprecedented rates. There is also little tolerance for downtime that can make it impossible to access important information.


Consequently, a large part of a data protection strategy is ensuring that data can be restored quickly after any corruption or loss. Protecting data from compromise and ensuring data privacy are other key components of data protection.

Principles of data protection
The key principles of data protection are to safeguard and make available data under all circumstances. The term data protection is used to describe both the operational backup of data and business continuity/disaster recovery (BC/DR). Data protection strategies are evolving along two lines: data availability and data management.

Data availability ensures users have the data they need to conduct business even if the data is damaged or lost.

There are two key areas of data management used in data protection: data lifecycle management and information lifecycle management. Data lifecycle management is the process of automating the movement of critical data to online and offline storage. Information lifecycle management is a comprehensive strategy for valuing, cataloging and protecting information assets from application and user errors, malware and virus attacks, machine failure or facility outages and disruptions.

More recently, data management has come to include finding ways to unlock business value from otherwise dormant copies of data for reporting, test/dev enablement, analytics and other purposes.