Make sure everything's not lost

Let's begin with a few 'scary but true' IT statistics. Industry analyst IDC's latest research suggests that, in 1988, there were 188 million Internet users around the world. Come the end of the last calendar year, there were 602 million. For all of you non-mathematicians out there, that's an increase of more than one third.

Every day now, they say, 31 billion e-mail messages are sent out around the globe. A phenomenal figure, to say the very least.

At the same time, researchers at the University of California have come up with one of those phrases beloved of academics: "It has taken mankind 300,000 years to accumulate 12 exabytes of data. It will take only another two-and-a-half years to double that figure."

Leaving aside precisely how big an exabyte actually is, what these statistics demonstrate is that anyone responsible for the provision and protection of IT data and information storage faces a massive challenge. While some business processes will always rely on printed, hard copy documents, more and more aspects of everyday commercial life are being carried out online. Sales documentation, Human Resources, accounts and other records can all be kept on a company's IT network, saving time, office space and administration costs.

Meeting your storage demands
Without doubt, e-mail is now the primary means of business communication. As such, most firms are increasingly aware of the need to have adequate IT infrastructures in place to meet storage demands. Yet many have still to consider and prepare for the possibility of that data being threatened by those IT systems failing or being 'knocked out'.

This worse case scenario is often approached by companies hoping that, at best, their documents are saved or recovered. It seems incredible that greater steps aren't being taken to ensure that everything's not lost if the worst does occur.

For most businesses, the worse case scenario isn't quite as dramatic as you might think, but the potential threat from terrorists or natural disasters – such as fire and flood – should never be ignored. Nor should the possibility of deliberate data theft, whereby hackers externally (or even internally) seek to gain unlawful access to stored information.

All that said, the most likely danger comes from accidental human error. According to The Financial Times, 50% of companies suffer data loss at some point through human error. Computers – as any user will know – aren't foolproof. It's remarkably simple to press the wrong key, forget to save your work or even spill coffee down the back of your machine, particularly when working under pressure.

The data back-up procedure
The solution lies in securing your data by backing it up. Most IT servers now have an in-built or easily-added facility that copies all the files from your system on to a cassette once a week or so. The idea is that these cassettes can then be used to restore all of your information in the event of any data loss.

However, there are a number of problems involved with relying on this type of method. While it's certainly better than no form of back-up at all, it's important to be fully aware of its limitations. To be frank, the main problem with standard tape back-up is that it's rarely completed in the proper manner.

Information from your company server(s) can now be sent via the Internet to a secure data centre or centres far away from the main business, where it’s then stored either on disk or ‘hosted’ on the web

There are several important steps towards creating a meaningful copy, and a mistake at any of those stages will leave you with a useless tape. First, the tape must actually be copying correctly, but unless you physically check this on a regular basis it can be very difficult to ascertain whether or not it's really capturing the information.

Second, the tape must be changed for each save (most firms use two or three tapes in rotation). If anything should go wrong during a save there'll always be one 'clean' version.

Last, it's essential that the tapes are removed from site after the back-up procedure has been completed. This task is most frequently carried out by a member of staff taking the cassette home with them. In the event of a theft, fire or other physical act within the office it's likely that the back-up will remain undamaged in its separate location.

These steps can be time-consuming, and are a rather large responsibility to place on the shoulders of the IT or security manager. Can you be sure that the employees taking the tapes home, often from multiple locations, are 100% reliable and honest? And even if the tapes are properly run, they still present a significant security threat. Given the protection offered by firewalls and other intrusion systems, hacking into a system to steal data can often be very difficult. Stealing a tape is – potentially, at least – a much simpler task.

Despite these warnings, a back-up tape is undoubtedly preferable to having a false sense of security, and only realising that your business isn't protected when it's too late. PriceWaterhouseCoopers has found that 90% of companies who don't have a contingency plan in place and then experience a 'data disaster' go out of business within 18 months. Combine this with the short term ramifications for a company that finds itself without its data and it's clearly something to be avoided at all costs.

Examining the remote option
How, then, might firms effectively protect themselves against this scenario? One method that's becoming increasingly popular and accessible is to back-up data remotely. This has several advantages that can make sure all of your electronically-stored information remains safe and secure, no matter what happens to the originals. Information from your company server(s) can now be sent via the Internet to a secure data centre or centres far away from the main business, where it's then stored either on disk or 'hosted' on the web.

Data is encrypted as it's sent and stored, ensuring that it can't be read by anyone other than the customer and thus avoiding the traditional security issues of using traditional tape back-up. The back-up may be run once every week or on a daily basis according to preference. Post set-up, the process is automatic and hassle-free.

Data back-up in this way is far easier to restore in the event of a 'disaster'. Anything from an entire server through to individual files may be retrieved almost immediately over the Internet. This provides firms with real peace of mind that not only is their data being stored securely and completely, if the worst should happen then it'll be straightforward to make sure vital data is up-and-running again.