Are you sure that your backup system is working effectively to protect your business from disaster?
Are you sure that your backup system is working effectively to protect your business from disaster?How many people do you know who thought they had an effective backup system in place and when their system crashed they found that they had lost important information?
Sadly I know quite a few people who have lost a lot of information.
Recently a new client lost his whole system after plugging an external drive from his customer into his system. Thankfully we had already started backing his system and were able to fully restore his system (remomtely) within a couple hours with no loss of data.
There are six common reasons why backups fail.
1. Overly-complex backup solutions
One of the major challenges for IT professionals is making sure that the whole set of business applications they use can interface with each other. If your organisation is using a mix of non-standardised products from different providers there is a strong likelihood that the software integration put in place to make the packages “talk” to each other may not work. If the packages can’t talk to each other the backups may not be working or may be incomplete. Some figures suggest that only about 20% of backups fully succeed.
2. Partial backups lose important information
One of the common backup problems is that some organisations only back up part of their dataset. One published survey of businesses found that 31 percent don’t back up email, 21 percent don’t back up application data, and 17 percent don’t back up customer data (including invoices, amounts owing, contacts, etc.). Some large organisations only back up their network files and not their local files assuming that employees only use the network.
3. Remote locations have forgotten backups
Some organisations with multiple or regional offices have good infrastructure and data management in their head office (often where the IT department are based) but often overlook the backup and data management of remote offices or of field staff. Your IT staff may not be overseeing the data management processes at remote or regional sites as closely as they oversee your corporate office even though the data may be subject to the same compliance regulations.
4. Low frequency backups increases data loss risk
Most companies do a daily backup although there are others still doing weekly backups. If you have a lot of people working on a project there is a risk that if your backup frequency is too low, weeks of accumulated work could be lost only a few hours out from a deadline. Historic information can be archived and will not change very much over time but current project work is being updated in real time in response to demands on your business.
5. Memory device failures
Backup data and information are commonly stored using tape and disk storage devices. Tape and disk storage solutions rely on high quality media. However, if the media is not maintained, not stored properly and not replaced before the end of its effective life there is a strong risk that it will fail at a critical time.
6. Poor software backup processes
It is important to have strong IT management practices in place, for instance, to store information and data in the correct software version compatible with your current operating system. If a legacy system crashes there is a risk that the software environment cannot be recreated and the data is unrecoverable. Your backup processes need to be changed to match changes to the system infrastructure.
For more information about safe, secure and reliable backup software and systems contact us.