“There are two kinds of people in the world – those who have had a hard drive failure, and those who will.”
Peter Krogh
CEOs, Operational Managers, IT Managers, please take note…backing up data should be a standard practice in your business. In fact, it is an operational requirement. Statistics from the US Small Business Association indicate says that 90 percent of companies go out of business within two years, after failing to recover lost data after a major data loss incident. While similar stats are not available for Jamaica, rest assured that a company’s failure to recover from a major data loss affects in our context, has at minimum, long term implications for financial recovery. Backing up important files and information using a secure and reliable method has never been so critical.
Any IT Administrator, worth their salt, should know the 3-2-1 Backup Rule. The 3-2-1 rule became a popular concept thanks to Peter Krogh, a well-known photographer who wrote that there are two groups of people: those who have already had a storage failure and those who will have one in the future. This timeless rule helps to address any failure scenario, and answers two important questions: how many backup files should I have and where should I store them? It goes like this…
- Have at least 3 copies of your data. By having three copies, the likelihood of common failure causes for all three is almost impossible. So, in addition to your primary data, you should also have at least two more backups.
- Store the copies on 2 different media. The above requirement cannot be fulfilled if you save your primary data and its backup in the same place. It is not uncommon after one disk failure, to experience failure of another disk from the same storage around the same time.
- Keep 1 backup copy offsite. Physical separation between copies is important. It’s really not a good idea to keep your external storage device in the same room as your production storage. If there was a fire (knock on wood!), you would lose all of your data. And while off site storage on tapes is still popular its durability and retrievability of data is highly questionable. In today’s world one should be looking to the Cloud (online backup) as an alternate data storage solution, such as Info Exchange’s Data Vault Backup & Recovery.
Online Backup Vs Tape
Storage Magazine reports that over 34% of companies do not test their backups and of those tested 77% found that tape backups failed to restore. According to Microsoft, 42% of attempted recoveries from tape backups in the past year have failed.
With portable media, the tapes or disks themselves can be secure, however, their security greatly depends on whether or not they are taken off-site. If not, your data will still be susceptible to natural disasters and theft. If the media is moved to a secure facility, there still remains a risk of damage during transport. Online backup provides a virtually risk-free method for protecting important business data. Info Exchange’s DataVAULT Online Backup and Recovery safeguards data by packaging files using an advanced technology.
Each data file is encrypted using a unique 256 bit encryption key that you choose to ensure that files cannot be accessed by others. For added security, each encrypted file is sent over the Internet via a secure channel using Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) technology which is the same Internet transmission technology that is used for online banking and credit card applications. The data resides in two military-grade data centers located hundreds of miles apart from each other. Each data center has 24/7 monitoring, advanced security technology
Essentially, everything you can do in a disc-to-disc-to-tape can be done better with a disc-to-disc-to-Cloud. The coup d’état being that Info Exchange’s DataVAULT online backup & recovery guarantees a 99.9999999% data uptime ….that’s just as good as being up all the time. So if you don’t already have a back up and recovery strategy, think about moving to the cloud with DataVAULT.
DataVAULT for Complete Data Protection. For more information on this and other IT solutions offered by Info Exchange please contact us at (876) 564-1926.
