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Audience: IT administrators
Last Updated: 8/28/2012 11:09:18 PM
**All times are EST**

Data Security vs. Data Protection

By Erik Rodriguez

Tags: data encryption, data backup, SAN replay, data archiving, data de-duplication

This article provides information on the difference between data security and data protection.

What is data security?

Securing data is often the first priority of any organziation and because of this, are many options available to acheive data security. These options are often firewalls, ACLs (access control lists), and variable-based security of some type. Depending on the importance of the data, companies may relay on any number of these methods.

What is data protection?

Data protection is the level of availability or confidence in being able to access such data. Like data security, there are many options to ensure data protection. These options often come in the form of RAID, data replication, and data archiving. Depending the data itself, companies may replay on any number of these methods. Data that is changed frequently may be stored at certain intervals using SAN replays, replication, a form of incremental backups.

Old data is often stored as archive data so that it may be referred to if and when it is ever needed. It's heavily compressed using a data de-duplication algorithm. It may be stored on any available storage medium include tape drives. Some archive data deemed for "deep security" is usually encrypted via software or, in poor cases encryption hardware device.

Some storage arrays have the ability to do some or all of the features mentioned. Virtualization software like VMware and Hyper-V have taken the needs of data protection and data security and developed tools to achieve both. As technology progresses, and more data shifts to the cloud we will see more emphasis on both data protection and data security.