Despite repeated warnings, many small businesses continue to bet the farm on IT backup systems that don’t work. Their tape backups often fail due to malfunctioning drive systems, software issues, or human error. Their disaster recovery plans that rely on these backups are rarely tested — if they exist at all. The problems are usually discovered when an actual disaster leads to loss of critical data and work products.
Smart Business spoke to Steven Vicinanza, CEO of BlueWave Computing LLC, about the new, highly cost-effective technologies that are easy to put in place to solve these problems once and for all.
What are the risks to companies’ data?
When people think of disaster planning they typically envision a fire or flood and perceive the risk as minimal. However, there are other risks that are much more common. No. 1 is equipment failure. Many believe that using mirrored or redundant drives (called RAID) eliminates the worry of a server failure. They rely on the fact that multiple drives must fail in order to lose data. Nothing could be further from the truth. For example, a very common failure point is a faulty server cooling fan, which will quickly cause overheating. Excess heat destroys disk drives resulting in catastrophic and total data loss.
Another all too common occurrence is equipment theft. With an active black market for personal identity information (which can be worth as much as $10 per person), many thieves are actually more interested in the data on the server than the hardware itself. Businesses like medical practices are especially attractive due to the large amount of social security and credit card information stored there. Obviously, if a server is stolen, the firm will find itself 100 percent reliant on the backup system to recover.
What’s wrong with current backup systems?
Most backups rely on removable media, such as tape, disk, or optical. Backup software running on the server copies its data files to the backup media. The media must be rotated daily and physically removed from the office to ensure recoverability in the event of theft or a facility disaster like a fire. This requires the constant diligence of office staffers, who must be trained in the backup procedures and troubleshooting.
In addition, the most economical and common media, magnetic tape, quickly wears out over time and is prone to failure. The result is that even if all procedures are correctly followed, there is no guarantee that the tape will function properly when called on. In addition, there is a huge security risk in having all the company’s data on a small, easy-to-remove tape backup.
The bottom line is that removable media backups are labor intensive, insecure and prone to human and mechanical failures.
