By ajohnson June 9, 2008 @ 10:52 am
I’ve heard some interesting stories from customers and sales reps about where companies store their backup data. One IT Director took the weekly backup data home with him each weekend. And then one day, while he was on vacation in Mexico, there was an outage at work and there was no way to retrieve the backup data. The good intentioned IT Director wanted to offset the risk by storing the data offsite. But was his home really the safest place for the company’s data?
Today, take a moment to consider “is my backup data in a safe location?”
Flooding in Iowa,twisters in Nebraska, and power outages in Michigan are just some of the disasters making headlines this summer. If it seems that everywhere you turn, there’s a natural disaster just waiting to happen, consider getting the advise from a company like Risk Management Solutions to help you decide the safest place for your data. “RMS is the world’s leading provider of products, services, and expertise for the quantification and management of catastrophe risk.” They have several cool maps on their website including one that depicts the regions with the most risk associated with natural disasters such as earthquakes, hurricanes, tornados, and hailstorms. Check it out below.
Judging by the map, Arizona is a safe place to put a datacenter for disaster recovery purposes. If you’re relying on truck-based vaulting and you don’t live in the area, perhaps AZ is impractical for storage. However, if you’re smart and relying on online backup, AZ is starting to look a lot more attractive.
Is your backup data in a safe location? 
By ajohnson June 3, 2008 @ 8:47 am
I received an email from a co-worker yesterday and thought I’d share it with you.
Subject Line: Another reason not to use truck-based vaulting services!
Besides the fact that truck-based vaulting is going to get very, very expensive because of rising fuel costs… losing tapes seems to be an increasing problem for off-site tape backup service providers.
“Bank of New York Mellon Corp. officials last week confirmed that a box of unencrypted data storage tapes holding personal information of more than 4.5 million individuals was lost more than three months ago by a third-party vendor during transport to an off-site facility,” reported Brian Fonseca from Computerworld.
Ouch!!!!!! Someone forgot the “IT 101″ of off-site tape vaulting - encrypt your tapes!!
By ajohnson April 24, 2008 @ 8:43 am
If you’re like most IT executives who are relying on tape backup as the crux of your disaster recovery strategy, you may agree, it’s not much of a strategy at all. And perhaps you are left wondering late at night, “How are we going to keep the email up and running in the event of fill in the blank?” Soon after what seems to be a passing thought, those OTHER fires consume much of your time. Where DO those fires and crises come from anyway?
“Usually from not-so-urgent things that people ignore because they are distracted by the crises of the moment. Then ignored, they cause the next fires and crises,” writes Getting Things Done author David Allen. Mr. Allen wrote a great piece in a recent issue of the Huffington Post entitled “The Curse of the Eternally Urgent.” His tips are relevant to anyone who maybe putting something off for tomorrow instead of completing the task/project today. Sound like someone you know?
After chatting with a few IT guys, I’m starting to understand how putting off disaster recovery planning is easy to do. Especially when you’re working at a growing company and those pesky fires appear. You know what worked in the beginning (i.e. tapes), won’t work today. But take Mr. Allen’s advice and complete the project in a series of action items. “I think you’ll find that many big and important projects have a two-minute-or-less next action on them. You can move several big and important projects forward, and feel better about making progress, by doing a few two-minute-or-less next actions,” writes Allen.
Before you rush off to design the perfect disaster recovery plan (or better yet, outsource it to experts like Simply Continuous), read Mr. Allen’s article.
By keves January 18, 2008 @ 12:30 am
ComputerWorld’s Sept 10 article on CDP is a good starting point for this emerging trend. It’s an example a technology that appeals to all, but is best to implement with relatively mature IT practices in place.
