Online
backup has been all the buzz recently. Nowadays it is imperative to
backup your company's data in order to protect against the countless
physical and cyber threats. What threats some may ask? Let's take some
real world examples to paint a better picture.
Disgruntled Employee Deletes Files Worth $2.5 Million
Believe it or not, this is not an isolated incident. Disgruntled employees are
one of the top threats to your company and your irreplaceable data.
Thankfully, their firm was able to recover their files, but at what
cost? In the article it states the service they used to recover the
files was quite costly. Are you prepared to do the same knowing that
there is no guarantee of recovering the files? You are at a distinct
disadvantage in this instance, and data recovery companies know it.
Prepare to pay top dollar...
When Data Tapes Go Missing
This
article is mainly about encryption but serves my point just as well.
The problem here besides the lost tapes? THE USE OF TAPES!!!! I know
tapes have been used for years and it is difficult to look at that
$5,000 piece of equipment you just purchased a year or two ago and be
told "that is not enough," but it truly is not. Think of all the human
interaction involved in tape backups. Someone has to set the backup,
load the tapes, cycle the tapes, transport the tapes offsite, and store
the tapes offsite in a secure, climate controlled location. And that is
just to do a backup!
How about the Restore process? You send someone
in a panic to retrieve the tapes, bring them back to your machine, load
them, start the restore, wait hours and sometimes days while the
restore takes place, and verify the restore worked. The very sad part
of all this is tapes aren't even that reliable. Maybe there was too
much humidity or dust in the environment where the tapes are stored and
you lose one and all of the data on it. The possibilities for failure
are far too many to risk your company's future on.
Then there is
the human error aspect. The one that comes into play in this article.
Someone is still responsible for transporting the tapes on and off site
every day/night. If that person leaves the company or is sick what
happens? What if for some reason, they forget?
Data Recovery - How You Simply Cannot Plan for Everything
First off, the author suggests another company's backup solution. So
why am I posting this? Because my point in this post is not to tell you
to buy the NEDS backup solution, (though I do hope you do, of course!)
but to urge you to backup your company's data with a secure, reliable,
and fully automated solution (Insert shameless plug here).
Latest "lost" Laptop Holds Treasure - Trove of Information
I'm
sure you're thinking "This is a bit of an obscure reference in terms of
data backup." And you're right! The first question that came to mind in
reading this
article was does AT&T know exactly whose information was on that
laptop? Was it everyone's? One department, division, location? I don't
know the answer to this question but if the data was backed up to a
secure, offsite location I could tell you they would know very easily
after performing a restore to another machine.
Also, what about
everyone's information? Whether or not the tapes are encrypted doesn't
really matter. Everyone's private information in stored on a physical
tape that can easily be stolen or misplaced. Give a person with
malicious intent enough time (which they will have if they steal a
physical tape) and they will eventually crack whatever encryption is on
the tape.
Conclusion:
These are four examples of
different ways your existing backup solution can fail you, using real
world, recent examples. As I briefly mentioned in this post earlier;
you don't even have to buy data backup from NEDS (Although if you did,
I would certainly appreciate it!).
Hopefully this post motivates
you to look into your existing or non-existing data recovery plan to
ensure it would work flawlessly if needed. As one of these articles
already said, "if something can go wrong, it will."