Plan for Data Loss – Think About Online Backups

Planning for data loss is just a natural part of doing modern business. In IT circles, we measure the availability of secondary storage (hard disks) in terms of Mean Time Between Failure (MTBF) rates – essentially, the number of months the manufacturer thinks your hard disk can run without failing. There’s also theft, employee sabotage, or just simple accidents. Then there’s the whole natural disaster problem: floods, earthquakes, hurricanes – Mother Nature is really unforgiving. Thus, device failure, destruction, and data loss is fairly inevitable. And I help my clients plan for it.

When I’m having that conversation, I try to point out all of the good reasons for a small business to think about data loss and disaster recovery. Imagine if your critical files, records, point-of-sale system, database, or imaged document library was rendered unavailable:

• How would you service your customers without automation?
• How would you pay your employees?
• How would you generate your financials, pay your taxes, make sure those AP payments are still made to satisfy your suppliers?
• Worse yet, how would that downtime translate into lost sales?

Unfortunately, small business owners tend to make a lot of assumptions about their readiness for disaster recovery – it’s pretty common. Example:

• Sure you have tapes, but when was the last time they were checked?
• If you record all of your sensitive data on to thumb drives, and you lose your thumb drive, now what? All of your company’s data is on an unencrypted device outside of your control? That’s not a strategy – dude, that’s a liability!
• Um, who knows how to recover the data? What’s the process?
• Where’s the disaster recovery procedure? Who gets contacted? What do you do?
• What happens if the required data isn’t actually actually being backed up? Like, you’re backing up the wrong stuff.
• And, what will happen if the facility burns down and you don’t have a tape drive. What then?

So when I’m having these discussions about disaster recovery, and my client is ready to start managing their risk instead of making assumptions, I like to talk about online backup.

What is Online Backup?

Online backups are performed by a program residing on your company’s servers, laptops, or PC’s. Daily, the encrypts your company’s sensitive data and transmits it over the Internet to a secure location. It happens automatically, without prompting, configuring, or any user intervention. Because there’s no media involved, online backup is cheap – dirt cheap – in comparison to other forms of hardware and media you’d have to purchase like tapes, USB/removable drives, or local NAS (Network Attached Storage) storage devices.

No Tapes, No Hassle.

Most small businesses have a pretty fast Internet connection. Online backups leverage that.  With online backups, administrators and end users aren’t involved with the backup process. Once it’s set up, administration can be monitored and performed remotely—jobs are re-queued and relaunched from the Internet. Think of it: no changing tapes, no cleaning, no rotation of tapes off-site, no remembering to swap out media. Once the backup is set it runs like a reliable service on your network.

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But is Online Backup Secure?

That’s a question that I always get. It’s a funny one because – more often – data maintained in-house is at more risk because it’s not professionally managed. Just think about how much risk you expose your PC to, or your laptop to, or, if you store your tapes in your car. Say, isn’t your computer the one with spyware and virus problems anyway? Well, with online backup, your data is encrypted before transmission, during transmission, and is stored encrypted on the remote server.  And only you have access to the data, completely preserving confidentiality and integrity. Plus, those servers are professionally managed at no additional cost. Huh – go figure!

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