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Kroll Ontrack, which is a data recovery and eDiscovery company in Minneapolis, shows a survey that 80% of all companies can eliminate or reduce the risk of data loss by placing the data in the virtual environment. Originally, virtualization is not intended to raise the level of data protection but it may make IT resources more efficient which means lower cost.

Actually, 40% of companies which introduce virtualization had experiences of data loss. Only 33% of them can recover the data.

Let us explain about how data protection can realize with below 4 protection levels.

Level	Recovery time	Protectable Range
1. CDP (Continuous Data Protection)	Immediate	Equipment Breakdown
2. Snapshot, Clone	Seconds to Minutes	Equipment Malfunction and Data Corruption
3. Remote Replication	Seconds to Hours	Equipment Malfunction, Data Corruption, Site Destruction and Natural Disaster
4. Offsite DR with Tape Backup&Archive	Hours to Days	Equipment Malfunction, Data Corruption, Site destruction, Natural Disaster,User Error by operating mistakes,Virus, Hacker Attack and Software Bug

It is better to classify the data with the following three indicators and operate some combinations without having enough budgets.

For example, it is adequate for compliance data which is important not for recovery time but for data contents to give level 4. On the other hand, Online-shopping chooses level 1 because downtime gives impact to business directly and it needs to recover as soon as possible. In general, higher levels it is, wider protection range it has. However it takes more recovery time. On the opposite side, lower level it is, more expensive it costs. Thus, it is important to choose each combination by the usage of data.