While economists contend the recession is over, many small businesses still feel vulnerable.
A recent CDW survey of small business owners found that fewer than half of the respondents were optimistic about their growth potential over the next five years. That mood is reflected in small business hiring plans, or the lack thereof. Earlier this month, George S. May International, a management consulting firm, reported that 74 percent of the small businesses it polled had no immediate plan to boost headcount. Of that group, 62 percent of the survey respondents said they had “no confidence in the economy sustaining the need for more employees.”
Smaller companies continue to feel economic pain, but a surprising number of them fail to protect themselves from situations that could inflict further damage. Backup provides a particularly glaring example. The same CDW small business report discovered that 73 percent of the firms with computing networks possess neither onsite nor offsite data backup.
Companies that fail to backup data are riding their luck. A severe data loss can wipe out a company in the best of times. Backup should take its place alongside IT security as a key component of any company’s data protection plan.
Getting Started
And as with IT security, a good place to start a data backup strategy is assessing what you have and where it’s located. Where does a company’s customer, transaction and financial data reside? Is it all on a server or does critical data also reside on PCs and mobile computing devices?
Company leaders must also weigh the importance of different types of data. The value of data will help shape the backup schedule and approach. A nightly backup may adequate for many organizations, but some firms may not want to potentially risk losing a day’s worth of data — in those cases more frequent backups are in order. In storage-speak, the backup period an organization finds acceptable is termed the recovery point objective.
The recovery time objective, meanwhile, deals with how quickly a company seeks to have data restored. The desired timeframe will drive the backup media selection. The need to recover rapidly, for example, will probably dictate a disk-based solution, which offers faster recovery time than tape storage. However, tape storage, still cheaper than disk, may prove the better choice for infrequently accessed data.
Backup Layers
Onsite backup can be fairly straightforward. Backup software for PCs abounds. Such products let users select what they want to backup, where the backups will occur — on an external hard drive or CD, for example — and how frequently they will take place. Small businesses with servers to backup might consider investing in a network-attached storage (NAS) device.
The backup job doesn’t end with the on-premise gear, however. A fire or other disaster can foil the best conceived on-site plan, so companies need to consider an off-site approach. Off-site tape is one way to go. Such a scenario might involve backing up an NAS device to a tape library and sending the tape cartridges to an outside facility for safekeeping.
With storage moving into the cloud, online backup provides another take on off-site storage. If you are interested in hearing about Sentinel IT’s on-site and off-site backup services contact us at 888-470-7487, option 1 for sales.
For further reading on backup, SNIA, a storage industry association, has a selection of storage publications including one on choosing a backup solution: click here
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Businesses neglect backups… and so do individual families. I know that all of my family photos from the past 10 years are on various hard drives around the home (we are a multiple computer household). If we loose a single hard drive we’re in trouble (especially with Grandma).
I’ve performed periodic backups of the data in the past to external hard drives and even off-site to the cloud, but getting everyone on board has been a struggle and the initial off-site backup bogged down my computer for days. I just installed a brand new NAS on the home / office network (I work from home) that is running RAID 1 (for a little added security) and has a built-in backup utility with FTP capabilities. With any luck, I’ll have all of the home (and office) computers backing up to the NAS and duplicated off-site within a week.