Choose the wrong approach to backing up your data and you could seriously damage your business: you could even end up in gaol! This is a true story, but has been suitably anonymised. It serves to demonstrate the importance of choosing your back up strategy carefully. Background The story involves a very large privately owned…
If you don’t check, how will you know? I was in town yesterday, posting cards for Christmas. Due to a mistake on my part I inadvertently sent the card intended for my brother in Australia to somebody else: leaving me a card short. In case you weren’t aware, yesterday was the last posting day for…
The consequences of Data Loss can affect others as well as your own company. Consider this in your Business Continuity Planning. A client of mine had an interesting story to tell the other day that should serve to highlight the importance of Business Continuity Planning. I look after their IT systems and he rang to ask…
If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound? I’m often intrigued by the reasons I get back from business owners and IT Managers when I ask the question: How often to you perform a test restore of your backups? Answers I’ve had include:…
Do you outsource your IT support? Read on Are you in a regulated industry or do you hold any information that can be classed as being confidential? Have you outsourced your IT support? Then you have a critical question to answer. Has your IT support company signed a Non Disclosure Agreement that binds them to…
Systems fail at the most inconvenient time. Having a plan to follow will reduce down-time and stress. If you have computers in your business, and I bet you do, you will know from personal experience that sometimes they go wrong. Usually this will cause only minor inconvenience but occasionally it can result in significant disruption…
It’s pointless storing all that data on your backup tapes if you can’t restore them later. Many organisations continue to store their backup data on magnetic tape. This is mainly because of volume versus cost and/or portability issues: the ability to transport tapes off-site for safe keeping. In any complex electro-mechnical environment it is usually…
Archives exist to hold the long term memory of an organisation. They need to be managed properly and in accordance with defined processes. There seems to be a lot of confusion about the term Archiving, particularly in the digital world, where it gets confused with Backup. I hope this post will clarify matters. Archived Records…
Not all backup systems are created equally, make sure yours is fit for purpose Backup systems seem like pretty boring things to most people. Sure, the people understand the need to protect their data and they have taken the step of backing up their data; but why should they care about what sort of backup…
Business Impact Analysis reveals the critical parts of your organisation. Use it to determine what to backup and how frequently. Backing up the data that forms the life blood of your organisation is one of the key Business Continuity Strategies, but actually deciding what to backup, where to store it and how frequently to backup…
