For business and IT executives facing tighter budgets in today’s economy, maintaining the integrity of their organizations’ data is more challenging than ever. Data backup, availability and recovery, and the processes required to ensure data centric compliance, consume significant portions of already strained IT budgets. IT executives have no choice but to continue searching for ways to do more for less. A holistic approach to data recovery — integrating multiple services in a single contract — provides a way for organizations to meet shorter recovery point objectives (RPOs) and recovery time objectives (RTOs) and achieve better results with greater flexibility and at lower cost.

Information and speed are the heart and life’s blood of business today. Data in all its forms constitutes 80% of all corporate assets. And while the value of a business may depend on the integrity and security of its data, a business’s data in turn derives maximum value from speed: in particular the speed at which business users expect current and historical information to be accessible and the speed with which operations can be returned to normal should a disruption or disaster make information unavailable.

That is why business continuity is all about the data. It is one reason that expenditures on data backup — the first step in a data recovery and business continuity plan — have grown to a staggering 40% of all corporate storage budgets. As data volumes continue to grow, that number will only get higher. Operational efficiency in this area therefore is vital to help achieve the cost control and reductions that companies need in today’s economy.

Companies are achieving some of those efficiencies — as quantified in shorter RPOs and RTOs — by replacing tape with disk as the media of choice for operational and disaster recoveries. Disk-based backup can help companies meet RPOs and RTOs that tape-only solutions cannot achieve. Several industry analysts estimate that by the end of 2010, 80% of all data recoveries will be from disk. This migration is already driving the rapid rise of disk based data de-duplication technology companies such as Data Domain.

But in terms of hardware acquisition, operation and maintenance, disk systems cost more than tape. So IT executives seeking the speed and other operational advantages of disk-based data backup are scrutinizing their backup and recovery processes to identify any opportunities for cost savings.

That begins with considering data backup and recovery as one integrated process as part of a company’s business continuity requirements. Many companies offer an overwhelming number of technology options in backup and recovery. The key is determining which set of options can be integrated into solutions that can meet a company’s RTOs and RPOs while also addressing its needs to assure data integrity and security and fulfill its regulatory compliance requirements.

Data is increasingly diverse, from file systems to medical images to music. And it’s clear there is no single solution that solves the backup and recovery issues for all types of data — or a business’s use of it. Additionally, different data has different priorities in terms of what needs to be backed up and recovered in order for an organization to re-establish operations following a disruption.

Service providers who treat data holistically offer backup and restoration, file retrieval, archiving and recovery as one interdependent and interlocked process — regardless of the type or volume of data. Such providers also offer the flexibility to adapt their solutions to meet their customers’ changing requirements.

Certain solutions providers further reduce customers’ costs by requiring no hardware investment on the customers’ part and allowing the customer to benefit from the economies and efficiencies of advanced data de-duplication and compression technologies by charging for the volume of data actually stored as opposed to the much larger volume that is backed up.

Finally, an integrated solutions provider can reduce a company’s data backup and recovery costs for the simple reason that a single qualified provider can provide multiple services more efficiently and economically than multiple providers. The fewer vendors an IT executive chooses to deal with, the more responsive and competitive each must become to win and keep the business.

For the past 30 years, industry has been making incremental improvements to tape based data backup and recovery processes. For businesses that need to improve the results of backup and recovery while reducing the cost, it’s time to change that paradigm completely. Tape, although still having significant uses in data retention, can no longer be the preferred media for an efficient and effective integrated backup and recovery process. And with an integrated provider of backup and recovery solutions will prove to be more cost-effective than a multi-vendor approach.