Does Your Company Have a False Sense of Security Regarding Data Backup?

Does Your Company Have a False Sense of Security Regarding Data Backup

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When your company's server crashes, how long will it take before your business is back up and running like usual? Most companies fall into one of these three categories:

1. No idea - this is, of course, bad, and scares most business owners.

2. You think you know, but actually have bad information - This is almost worse than #1 because it can lead to a false sense of security and prevent you from taking appropriate action.

3. You do know. Wonderful! Now, are you happy with what you know? Are you happy with "4 hours" or "8 hours" or "2 weeks" being the answer?

Below are three common (and very costly!) misunderstandings that many business owners have about their data backup that give them a false sense of security.

Misunderstanding #1 - Believing in the power of a tape backup and that it is a reliable way to secure your data. All tapes will fail. They have an average failure rate of 100%, and no that is not a typo. What makes this even more dangerous is that tape backups will even appear to be working, lending to the false sense of security listed above.

Misunderstanding #2 - Backing up your data will allow you to fully restore your network backup to its original state, quickly and easily. Wrong! Having just a copy of your data will not guarantee this at all. Let's look at a simple scenario to bring some better understanding to this. Let's say we made an exact replica of all the items in your house right now and put them offsite in a storage facility - that's a backup of your "data." If your house then burned to the ground we would have to rebuild the house (which is the server, software and supporting environment) BEFORE we could restore all your items back from the storage facility. Obviously that takes some time. That is why simply having an off site copy of your company data doesn't guarantee you will be back up and running FAST. It could take several days, even weeks, before everything was restored and that is assuming you have the data in a clean state and all the originally installed software media.

Misunderstanding #3 - Trusting that the backup is automatically working without doing any data restoration testing. I see this in almost every business I go into. Most business owners think their backups are working because they don't see any error messages or obvious problems. Once it is time to restore some data only then do they discover their backup hasn't worked in months and that data is long gone. Backup and disaster recovery for a business needs to be designed appropriately, installed correctly, and regularly tested. You may have no idea, some idea, or a complete idea about how well your company is being backed up but if you haven't had a professional review and validate your process it may be time. The cost of not knowing or thinking you know is just too great.

If your company does not trust its data backup and recovery plan, you should speak to a certified IT support company you can trust.

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