Backup Revisited

Backup Revisited Not-so-obvious ideas to bolster your business continuity plan BY RONNIE PARISELLA

THE TO-DO LIST

Give credit to El Niño, or the polar vortex, or Superstorm Sandy. In the past fi ve years, most businesses have become aware of why and how to back up and have adequate redundancy for their data in the event of a catastrophic weather event or other disaster. Now that you know you have the ability to recover all your data, the question is, how long would that take? And can you make it happen faster? Recovery time after a disaster can be the most painful part, so consider the following.

Prioritize your data. Many business leaders are shocked to realize just how much data they have to protect. When you include email, servers, databases, and all other critical data, the amount is too large to recover quickly and easily. With your team and possibly the help of outside IT experts, identify all of your data. Then, categorize it: need it now, need it next week, need it next month. Any items in the fi rst category should be prioritized for ready access when or if the Stuff Hits the Fan.

Reduce your data. Yes, fast Internet connections help by saving time when backing up remotely. Even so, try to reduce your data stores, and archive old data to minimize the amount you back up. Speak to your IT vendor about consolidating your servers and defragmenting your databases, such as Microsoft Exchange, or your applications, such as ERP. This can save hundreds of gigabytes and speed your recovery time.

Test, test, and test again. In my experience, even the most prepared businesses fail to test their business continuity plan suffi ciently. Instead, they wait until something goes wrong, implement the plan, then run into problems. The only process that will reveal your vulnerabilities is testing. Test your plan quarterly with various scenarios that identify critical service unavailability. What happens if your server loses power? What if your Internet router goes down? Revise your plan after every test.

Check your vendors’ business continuity plan. If the power is on and your phone systems are working, your continuity plan worked. But if your providers’ lines are down, you are down. Therefore, you should not only be aware of your vendors’ plans, but build them into yours. Ask your vendors to provide documentation of their redundancy. They should be able to describe their infrastructure and provide the most common outage scenarios. Your customer service rep may tell you, for example, that if the company has to cut over to a completely separate site, it will take eight hours, or a day, or two days. You need to be okay with that—or pick a different vendor. No matter who you choose to work with, keep a vendor contact list with account numbers and key contacts ready to go in case you need it.

Have redundant Internet lines and email services. Entry-level Internet connections are very costeffective these days, especially in and around cities. In many cases you can get a backup cable modem Internet circuit for less than the price of a daily gourmet cup of coffee. If your primary email goes down, at a minimum your employees need to be able to log on to a different site to check their email. One consideration here is to make sure your fi rewall will support two concurrent connections. If not, upgrade fi rst.

Think about alternatives. What if you cannot reach your PC? Your offi ce? Your building? If you are worried about getting access to your data quickly, know that USB drives are great for small amounts of critical information. Consider backing up your My Documents folder or fi nancial data to a portable device monthly, and keep it in a secure location (away from your primary data location) for access if needed. In addition, some companies simply use the business owner’s home as a backup site.

Ronnie Parisella is director of information technology at Net@Work, a full-service business consultancy and technology solutions provider.

THE NETWORK OF POSSIBILITY

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36% over-utilization of network resources

36% unsupported planned growth

35% lack of tools to resolve critical events OUTDATED NETWORKS CHALLENGES OF

74%

Top Pressures for Network Initiatives

rising user demand for services

53%

increased highbandwidth traffic

100% or more bandwidth capacity increase

40%

or more network throughput increase 32%

end-users extremely or very satisfied with network performance

TOP STRATEGIES FOR IMPROVEMENT 4 2 % d e s i g n n e w n e t w o r k i n g s t r a t e g y 3 8 % a u t o m a t e p e r f o r m a n c e m o n i t o r i n g n e t w o r k c a p a c i t y 5 3 % i n c r e a s e

GO

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