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."
