Imagine that one or all of your offices
are hit by a natural (or unnatural) disaster. Your equipment is lost, including the computers and software that
held all of your company’s vital information. Could your company survive the
setback? How would you minimize the
negative impact? How will you ever get
your information back?
“It comes down to the old adage that
you don’t want all of your eggs in one
basket,” says Chris Hibbs, engineering
manager for InsightBusiness. “Whether
it’s a natural disaster, like a tornado, or
an unnatural disaster, like somebody
stealing your hardware, if all of your
equipment is in one spot, you’ve got a
problem because you cannot get your
systems back up and running and you’ve
potentially lost all your data. At that
point, trying to recreate everything, particularly during a disaster, could be
impossible.”
Smart Business spoke with Hibbs
about how you can prepare your organization to respond to disasters and how
to protect yourself from losing important information.
What is the best way to protect your IT information and why should it be done off-site?
Backup systems can be somewhat low
tech or extremely high tech — it’s all
based on how much money your company wants to (or can) spend. Let’s start
out at the low end. Say your company
has all of its financial records, customer
lists and ordering systems on a PC or a
small server. The easy thing to do is burn
a DVD or a CD, take it home and put it in
a safe, and then do a weekly backup of
that information or do an incremental
backup of the data that’s changed. But,
when you’re in business and your business isn’t running your backups back
and forth between two locations, you
tend to forget those things.
There’s plenty of software out there
that will do automated backups if you
have an Internet connection or a point-to-point connection to an off-site facility
that has a computer. Once a night, this
software will take an incremental snapshot of all your data and park it out on the Web or on an off-site PC.
What if my company is larger and I need a
more advanced system?
With larger companies, you are talking
about off-site data centers with sophisticated backup systems that send daily
and, in some cases, up-to-the-minute
data replication over to the data center.
Then, if any of the business’s facilities
go down at any given moment, the data
can be back up and running within
hours, rather than days. Hospital groups
and large financial groups need security
like that. Patient and client records need
to be accessible. They can’t have a failure and they can’t lose information.
Therefore, they have to spend a considerable amount of effort to be sure that
they’re always up and running.
Also, regardless of company size,
depending on how vital it is to day-today business, you may want to consider
having a backup Internet service
provider. Even if you’re very comfortable with your provider, a second
provider could protect you even further,
at a relatively minimal cost.
What happens if you have a data issue?
When you’re doing an incremental
remote backup, that’s not a lot of data
going back and forth (relatively speaking). All you’re doing is updating what
has changed and you generally have several hours overnight to send that information to your off-site server or data
center. But, say you have to get a hold of
all the information that you have and get
it back to the main office, because you’re
trying to rebuild a server or a database
that crashed. If you currently use a 100-megabit connection to your data source
when you’re pushing your data out on a
day-to-day basis, then when you’re trying to bring all of that data back in after
a failure, you probably don’t have nearly
enough bandwidth.
Having the flexibility to increase that
pipe size very quickly is a huge deal. If
your normal data consumption is 100
megabits, when you try to rebuild your
data it could take you several hours or
more to pull it all back. But, by temporarily increasing the pipe to one gigabit (1,000 megabit), that same task takes
one-tenth of the time.
Additionally, when you’re using all of
your available bandwidth, often you
may not actually know what your true
bandwidth needs are. Metro Ethernet
connections have the ability to scale
anywhere from 5 megabits to 1,000
megabits. So if you already have a 10-megabit connection, you can easily
scale it to a 20-megabit connection, and
if you peak that, you can easily scale it
up to a 30-megabit connection, and so
on until you find the right bandwidth
amount to suit your needs. You can set
it to exactly what you want and pay for
it accordingly.
Information in this article is general
in nature. The requirements of each
business will vary according to its
specific needs.
CHRIS HIBBS is engineering manager for InsightBusiness. Reach him at (502) 410-7357 or [email protected].
