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Online Backup Services & Your Business Data

In this article

The Importance of Backups in Risk Management
Threats and Risks to Your Data
Problems with Tape Backup
Problems with Tape Recovery
Description & Advantages of Online Backup Services
Moving Forward - We Can Help

The Importance of Backups in Risk Management

Imagine that you walk into your office tomorrow morning and your entire computer network is missing. Your computers are gone, your servers are missing, your data is inaccessible. You came to work expecting to check your email, contact your clients, work on your projects, bill your customers, but the question is - will you be able to?

Now consider your existing risk management policy and how insurance is supposed to help. This one is simple. Any insurance claim cannot recover or rebuild your lost or corrupted data. This means your customer lists will still be missing, along with your record of accounts receivable, your actively working projects, and whatever else you store in your digital filing cabinets, even if you receive brand new systems.

And although you might not ever arrive at your office to find your computers missing, you are much more likely to arrive at your office and experience something just as tragic as losing all of the information that is stored on them. What good are plastic and metal cases and components without the valuable information they store? You must protect this information, and this is where the value and assets of your business lie. Remember, it only takes one technological disaster, one virus, one electrical surge, or one hardware failure to be the equivalent of having all your computers being thrown out the window.

As you can see, your data backup and recovery planning is a big component, if not the most important, in business risk management planning, and now more than ever is the time to consider the role your backup process currently plays in your business risk management puzzle.

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Threats and Risks to Your Data

There are many potential dangers that exist to your data and its integrity.

Lack of Responsibility
Amazingly enough, tape backup falls into this category, as well as any type of manual backup (CD-ROM, hard disk copy, etc.), so we mention this one first.

This involves the factor of human error, which can occur by an employee or staff member accidentally deleting a file, erroneously modifying data in a file, or carelessly not configuring or maintaining an already existing backup process that requires human interaction, as in the case of tape backups, for instance. Unfortunately, not maintaining a backup process that requires work on your end usually remains unnoticed or unattended until you need it, and at that point in time, it is probably too late.
Hardware & Environmental Failures
Hardware failure is the most well known and easily understood data risk. The most common failure in this category is a simple hard drive crash. There are environmental variables that can corrupt your data, including power outages, brownouts, and power surges, and not only can these cause data corruption, but they can also take out a hardware component and cause data loss.
Software Failures
Several are on the list of software failures, which include database corruption (which can be invoked from a network failure or computer crash), viral infections, or errors in software program design, to name a few.
Catastrophic Events
These include fires, floods, tornadoes, hurricanes, lightning strikes, or even theft. This type of risk is rare, but no matter where your business location resides and how safe you think you are, it can happen.

To provide a safety net for these risks, you need an automated, reliable, and offsite backup solution to handle and maintain your data backup process.

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Problems with Tape Backup

A majority of today's business rely on tape backup to manage their data protection plan. Below are some of the disadvantages in the backup process using tapes.

Expensive Investment
Tape backup technology requires that you purchase a tape drive and backup tapes. A good tape drive costs approximately $500 or much higher, and tape media cost anywhere from $50 to $100+ each. A typical tape backup solution requires 10 tapes (2 weeks of working business days) for retention and an additional 12 tapes for monthly archival.
Up-keep & Obsoletism
Hardware components and media can break, so replacement costs must also be considered. And like all hardware technology, obsoletism is right around the corner. This will require new hardware and media purchases to be made. Also, your data information storage is likely growing (if your business is growing), and tape drives and tape media have a maximum capacity. This means that when you exceed your limit, you must purchase more hardware and media.
Not Inherently Automatic / Too Much Interaction & Maintenance
Tape backup requires constant interaction by your assigned tape backup operator. This causes someone to remember to put in a tape in the drive daily (even when the assigned is on vacation), and costs timely resources that could otherwise be focused on work related to your business, so you lose money there. Also, it is common for laziness, forgetfulness, or carelessness to set in and the whole backup idea dangerously loses its momentum. Simply put, too much required interaction and maintenance by you can also be too much of a distraction when you are trying to manage your own business responsibilities.
Not Inherently Safely Offsite
Even with tape backup, to protect against a catastrophic event from destroying your tapes, you are still required to physically carry the tapes offsite to an offsite location. Plus, the offsite location must be a safe enough distance away from the location of your business to provide ample safety against any distance-wide catastrophic event, like the path of a tornado or the rise of a flood or a city-wide fire like Chicago's 1871. Remember that if you decide to keep a plastic fire safe holding your backup tapes, it must be sufficient enough to withstand the typical building fire temperature of 2000°F.
Not Very Reliable
Oftentimes, "automated" tape backup jobs just stop working, and unless your backup software has an email notification function, this will remain unnoticed and be fatal to your backup process. If you are notified, then cost comes back into the picture as technical support will have to get involved to reinitiate the backup process, all the while your tape backups are not working.
Not Secure
Tape backup devices and tape software are not designed to encrypt your data when your data is put onto your backup tapes. If any of your backup tapes become lost or stolen and your intellectual property gets into the wrong hands, your data that is stored on them can easily be used against you competitively or unlawfully (considering exploitation of your customer's private information).

Problems with Tape Recovery

Below are the disadvantages when you try to restore your data from tape.

Recovery is Slow
Tape backups are magnetic, so recovery is sequential. Also, recovery is manual because you have to manually insert tapes and sequentially search for the appropriate data to restore. In the event you need to recover or restore data, the efficiency and time required to get up and running is crucial. You cannot get back to work until your data is restored.
Recovery is Expensive
Remember, the more time spent recovering lost data from tape, the more dollars you lose to salaried employees who cannot work, to customers that cannot be billed, and to support agents assisting in recovery. Also, your customers and potential customers will lose confidence in your business from your display of irresponsible data management. Lastly, if you have an entire tape drive go bad, finding and purchasing a compatible tape drive to handle your media will be an expensive, labor and time intensive headache.
Not Very Reliable
As mentioned above, sometimes "automated" tape backup jobs just stop working, and unless your backup software has an email notification function, this will remain unnoticed and be fatal to your backup process, making recovery impossible.

Description & Advantages of Online Backup Services

The description of how online backup services work is simple:

Software is installed and configured on your servers and/or computers to automatically backup your selected data.
Backup data is encrypted by the software and sent through the Internet to a secure data center, where it is stored.
Recovered data is sent from the secure data center through the Internet to your servers and/or computers, decrypted by the software, and restored.

The picture below shows this process.

The advantages of this type of system are listed below:

No Additional Hardware Required
You can avoid expensive hardware purchases, up-keep, and obsoletism. You simply leverage your already existing Internet connection as your backup transfer medium.
Fully Automated Scheduling / Requires No Daily User Interaction
You do not have to interface with the service on a daily basis as with tapes. You simply set the schedule, and it automatically sends it over the wire.
Automatically Stored Offsite
You do not have to worry about taking backups offsite. They are safely stored at the data center with your trusted online backup provider.
Reliable with Advanced Notifications
You will be notified if problems arise, and the provider's technical support is actively monitoring your data backups for you.
Very Secure with High Encryption of Data
More secure than tapes, your data remains encrypted while being transferred over the Internet and during storage at the secure data center. Most importantly, only those whom you have given the decryption password to have access to decrypt and restore your data, which such security is non-existent in the tape backup world.
Centralized Backup Store
Since the service is Internet-based, you can perform backups from multiple systems across your entire enterprise to a single backup store. This provides a centralized store that holds all your backups in one place, instead of having a backup device, medium, and location for each system and/or branch office.
Recovery is Fast and Portable
Unlike magnetic tape media, you can recover from any retention period and retrieve data as quickly as you can download a file from the Internet. Also, since the service is Internet-based, you can elect to perform data restorations to any of your computer systems. This portability comes in real handy if you have a server crash.

Moving Forward

Using our online backup software, PronetProtect Online Backup, we can help you revamp your backup strategy. In fact, because we feel that utilizing this technology is the absolute best method of data protection, we have made this a requirement for all our clients using our outsourced network management contracts, and even more - we use it ourselves!

To contact us about PronetProtect or our outsourced network management services, click here.

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