Summertime is the best, obviously. BBQs, swimming and generally lounging around can’t be beat. Unfortunately, the weekend’s over and we’re all back at our computers pecking away.

Jo Maitland and I recently put together a summer reading roundup of the top 10 data backup news stories of the year with related expert advice. Some of the backup topics that we’ve been following this year include data deduplication, backup as a service, remote backup, tape transport and bare-metal restore.

Check out our Top 10 data backup news stories and tips now.

Over the past month, I’ve been working on putting together podcast tips with some of our experts. Pierre Dorion, certified business continuity professional for Mainland Information Systems Inc., recently contributed a podcast called “Outsourcing backup: Get the right service level agreement”.

In this tip, Pierre discusses the questions that can help you ensure that a service level agreement (SLA) meets your requirements when outsourcing backup, such as:

• What are your data recovery needs?

• How fast can your data be restored?

• What are the contractual obligations of the SLA?

• Does your service provider have a solid disaster recovery plan in place?

Pierre also offers practical advice on making sure these questions get addressed. Check it out below.

 

 Outsourcing backup: Get the right service level agreement: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Elsewhere on the Web, check out www.sla-zone.co.uk. It’s got a bunch of useful SLA information, broken down into topics such as services, performance, problem management, customer requirements, termination, and so on. Also, www.itil-itsm-world.com has a series of documents that are used to help build a framework for service management, including information on service level agreements and IT outsourcing.

Hitachi Data Systems announced a major upgrade to its Content Archive Platform, which SearchStorage.com News Director Jo Maitland reported on today. If you’re considering adopting an archiving product, you might want to check out the second chapter of the Data Retrieval Research Guide, which we published this week. It highlights the key issues involved with retrieving data from archives, with lots of information on CAS and deduplication.

We also recorded a podcast on email archiving a while back, which offers information about archiving with CAS and dealing with unstructured data. Check that out below.

 

 Standard Podcast [42:00m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Elsewhere, you might be interested in reading what Hu Yoshida, vice president and CTO of HDS, has to say about HDS’s Content Archive Platform in a recent blog post entitled “When is CAS not CAS?”.

Unstructured data is… well, it’s unstructured. Unruly, even. Unbearable? Well, maybe that’s a bit too much, but it’s definitely hard to deal with. Word documents, email, images and MP3s, among other types of files, are crowding storage systems at an exponental rate and classifying this data can be very difficult. Analysts note that 85% of data in a typical enterprise is considered unstructured, and managing all of this data is a growing concern for many enterprises.

In this podcast, Pierre Dorion offers practical answers to the most common questions about unstructured data management he hears from storage pros today.

Download the Unstructured data management FAQ podcast.

These days, its tough to ignore the ever-present coverage of security breaches and identity theft in the news. In this podcast, storage security expert Kevin Beaver offers practical answers to the most common security questions he hears from storage pros today.

Download the Storage Security FAQ podcast.

Kevin is a frequent contributor to SearchStorage.com, check out some of his recent storage security tips below.

Why and how your storage environment will be attacked
Storage security and the firewall DMZ problem
Five must-have storage security testing tools
Hack your storage to test your security

Elsewhere on the internerd, you might want to check out this recent webcast on storage security by Jon Toigo.

Then, go lock the doors and windows.