Data Protection Options for Microsoft SharePoint Lag Despite Phenomenal Growth

At the turn of the millennium, email in general and Microsoft Exchange specifically became the must-have corporate application. Today businesses cannot imagine how they ever functioned without Exchange as it has become the most mission critical application in most organizations. Now that same experience is again repeating itself as companies come to understand the power of Microsoft SharePoint and what it means in terms of improved productivity for their employees. The bad news is that as more companies adopt SharePoint as a key application, they are encountering the same problems protecting and recovering SharePoint data that they used to encounter with Exchange.

The rapid corporate adoption of SharePoint was made evident by a recent InfoWorld article that cited a 2007 IDC survey. 61% of the 300 companies surveyed were deploying SharePoint across their enterprise while another 28% were expanding their use of SharePoint. But what that survey failed to examine was how companies were protecting SharePoint after they deployed it and what challenges they were encountering.

To get a better understanding of the issues associated with protecting Microsoft SharePoint, I recently had a chance to talk with Covenant Technology Partner's CTO, Clayton Groom. Covenant Technology Partners (CTP) is a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner that provides expert support on a variety of Microsoft technologies (.Net, CRM and SharePoint) and has supported SharePoint since Microsoft first released it several years ago. CTP has seen a substantial uptick in SharePoint adoption by corporations in the last few years, but as that has occurred it has also witnessed corporations making many of the same mistakes in their SharePoint implementation and protection that they originally made with Exchange.

One of the biggest mistakes that Groom sees companies initially making is underestimating how fast SharePoint will grow in their environment. Companies often try to do the initial SharePoint install themselves but fail to follow best practices for a SharePoint installation because they are not as well known as best practices for Exchange. For example, in Exchange it is important to create accounts for specific functions. The same is true in SharePoint where it is equally important to create specific accounts for SharePoint administration, security and service in order to facilitate the rapid growth that often occurs in SharePoint environments.

As this growth occurs, the difficulty of protecting SharePoint data increases exponentially since multiple instances of SharePoint make it more difficult to create recoverable images. Groom specifically cautions that companies should not assume that a backup of the SharePoint content repository necessarily means that it is protected. In fact when asked directly, Groom stated that "The answer to that is a resounding 'NO'".

As the number of SharePoint instances grow in a corporate environment, Groom recommends that application administrators minimally answer the following questions to ensure they can recover their SharePoint application and data with their data protection solution:

• Can different versions of SharePoint be recovered?
• Can SharePoint be recovered regardless of who installed it?
• Can specific patches installed on each Sharepoint instance be recovered?
• In the event of disaster recovery, what SharePoint components are registered and can these components be recovered?

Microsoft SharePoint is following much the same path in organizations that Microsoft Exchange took in the late 1990's and is well on its way to becoming a critical business application comparable to Exchange. But as CTP's Groom aptly points out, traditional methods of data protection are not enough when it comes to SharePoint protection, especially in circumstances where companies have multiple instances of it installed. In an upcoming blog entry, I'll take a look at what options data protection software should offer to protect SharePoint and more specifically how InMage Systems DR-Scout is evolving to address this challenge.