August 29, 2005

Data Security Options: YOU HAVE NO EXCUSE

Listen. I am NEVER going to stop beating the drum of how important data security is for your business. Every data security plan is different. In my case, there's only one thing I MUST backup manually and that's my email.

Smallbiztechnology.com web site is on a local PC and of course at my web host (Hypermart.net) - so it's automatically backed up.

PDA data (all my contacts, date book and etc) is on my PDA and synchronized to my PC.

Video/photos of my family and other things is on a backup USB 80GB hard disk (manual).

The few documents I write, I guess I should back them up, but I don't - yet. Other than that, a backup CD of my notebook original files is also what will be backed up. Fortunately Gateway has an automatic way to do this.

InfoWorld has a great overview of backup options and writes SMBs and ROBOs rarely have the luxury, however, of duplicating big-time backup schemes on a small scale. Typically, they lack the administrative and operational expertise, the capital for tape hardware, or the money to pay an off-site vault company month after month.

The unfortunate result is that many small offices do not back up their data at all -- or they use an inexpensive system fraught with design flaws and operational challenges, such as a single tape drive that performs a full backup every night. Those tapes typically stay on site and in many cases sit inside the backup server, allowing a single break-in or fire to destroy everything. Worse, lack of oversight may mean that backups are routinely falling under the radar -- until a failed attempt at restoring them gets somebody fired.

SMBs and ROBOs know they need backups that work. They just can'?t perform them affordably and reliably. What'?s needed is the equivalent of an AOL for backups -- click OK, pick a screen name, and make backups happen. But the relatively slow connections typical of SMBs and ROBOs mean that conventional backup schemes, in which one change to a huge file results in that entire file being backed up, must be replaced by more intelligent, incremental schemes.

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