Is My Data Safe?

There is so much fear-mongering and mis-information in the data back up and disaster recovery world that sometimes it is difficult to answer such a simple question. We have tried to make it simple for a company to evaluate what they have, if it works and what they need to be protected.

Here are some key questions to be asking:

1. Where is my data stored? – It seems simple enough, but it is not in these days. Really the answer is a combination of three options. Either your data is onsite, off-site on an appliance, and/or in the “cloud.” Different locations have different advantages and disadvantages.

2. How is the data accessible? – If data needs to be retrieved, how do you do that? Is it through one of your employees? Is it through a contractor or IT support company? If you needed to get the data today, who would you call and how long would it take them to get it to you?

3. What is being backed up and how often? – This is where the disconnect usually happens. What you think is being backed up and how often may be significantly different from what is actually being backed up. Is it data from your computers and laptops, from your servers, or from your email client? Is it what you need to be backed up? Are you backing up things that you really don’t need?

4. Are you backing up data or the environment? – Here is an easy way of looking at this question. Imagine your IT environment is a kitchen. If you are backing up the data, it’s like backing up the pots, pans and food items in the fridge. If you are backing up the environment, it’s like having a second kitchen that mirrors the original kitchen with pots, pans, food, oven, refrigerator, cabinets and sink. If you have a pot that goes missing, it is easy to replace if you are backing up data. However, if your kitchen burned down, getting replacement pots, pans and food does not make your kitchen functional again.

5. Are you paying for things you don’t need? – If you are backing up every device in your company, every 10 minutes, you are getting into the realm of excessive. Think of delivering pizzas with a $2,500,000.00 Ferrari F60, when a $17,000.00 Kia Soul will work just fine.

These are real functional questions that you can ask of your current situation.

To put this into a real-life situation, we had a client at the beginning of a 4-year project raise questions about the materials specified by the owner of the project, but after several discussions the owner wanted the specific materials outlined. Time goes by, the project wraps up and low and behold the specified material fails, and the owner sues claiming that it was the responsibility of the contractor to be the expert on the materials used and that because no concerns were raised it was their responsibility. In the construction world, team members come and go. Could they find the string of emails that specified the concerns and had the owner signing off on the failed materials? The scary part was our client wasn’t sure what they had backed up or how to access it because our client was in the “Construction” business not the “Data Protection” business. In this case, they could, because they had engaged us to help protect them from what they “Didn’t Know” and all of their emails were not only stored but indexed for quick and easy search. A simple backup of emails that cost them less than coffee for the office every month saved the day and a multi-million dollar lawsuit.

Hopefully this article will help you get past the fear-mongering and evaluate your current situation. The take away is to look at what you have in place now, know how to access it, and look to see if you have what you need to fit your business situation. Don’t be afraid to ask questions, at the end of the day, it is “Your Business” and “Your Money”, protect them.

In our next article, we will go over some of the more common test scenarios to test your current systems.

Go forward in faith and confidence, not in fear. – YobiSync.