Virginia network failure causes lengthy recovery process

Contributed by Roumiana Deltcheva (Friday, September 03, 2010) | Category : Email security

State IT leaders in Virginia are scrambling to recover data after a recent unexpected network failure.

The outage affected IT operations at 27 state government agencies for more than a week while the state's IT professionals worked to reinstall its data-leak prevention system. The issue resulted from an unexpected issue with a storage area network that shut down 13 percent of the state government's file servers. The issue may create an arduous data retrieval process in which the company that maintains Virginia's IT networks will have to recover all the lost data.

"Our efforts to examine the factors that contributed to the initial problem and the lengthy restoration of service is just beginning," said Linda Mills, the company's president.

Virginia's Chief Information Officer Sam Nixon said the loss from the network failure had been "minimal," and reported the state has been working "around the clock" to recover important government data. However, as the data recovery process was still ongoing, it is still unclear whether the state had accurately measured the full amount of the data lost or if they will be able to retrieve all of it.

Integrating secure solutions for disaster recovery and creating simple access to archived data is becoming an essential tool, as all organizations are susceptible to unexpected network failures and data loss issues.