The CIO for SMB

It seems to me that most businesses have a backup plan. When I talk to small business owners and office managers, most of them say something like…

“We back up the server every night to tapes and Nancy takes the tape home.”

“We back up this server over here to that server over there.”

“We have a different hard drive for each day of the week. The computers get backed up over night and we swap the tapes out every morning.”

“I back everything up to my laptop and take it home with me at night.”

Years ago if you were backing up any data, you were ahead of the curve. Times have changed. It is no longer enough to have the data and the files backed. Of course you have to do that.

But if you had a catastrophe, one where you completely lost your desktops, laptops and servers, how long would it take you to get back online?

Assuming you have tested your data backup on a regular basis so you know that data is being backed up properly, how long would it take to:

• Order the new servers and computers?
• Ship the new servers and computers?
• Rebuild the new servers and computers with not only the data, but also the software?

My guess is that it represents a longer time frame than you can handle. I recently called on a law firm with daily expenses in the $30,000 plus range. A week with no billing and there goes a bunch of the profit for a while.

Ran across a blog post on resotre solutions that I like a lot:

I was discussing this with a colleague recently as we compared difficulties multiple customers are having with backups in general.  My colleague was relating a discussion he had with his customer where he told them, “stop thinking about how to design a backup solution, and start thinking about how to design a restore solution!”

Most of our customers are in the same boat, they work really hard to make sure that their data is backed up within some window of time, and offsite as soon as possible in order to ensure protection in the event of a catastrophic failure.  What I’ve noticed in my previous positions in IT and more so now as a technical consultant with EMC is that (in my experience) most people don’t really think about how that data is going to get restored when it is needed.  There are a few reasons for this:

• Backing up data is the prerequisite for a restore; IT professionals need to get backups done, regardless of whether they need to restore the data.  It’s difficult to plan for theoretical needs and restore is still viewed, incorrectly, as theoretical.
• Backup throughput and duration is easily measured on a daily basis, restores occur much more rarely and are not normally reported on.

Traditional backup has been done largely the same way for a long time and most customers follow the same model of nightly backups (weekly full, daily incremental) to disk and/or tape, shipping tape offsite to Iron Mountain or similar.

Read the rest of the post at Storage Savvy.

Bottom line…talk to your MSP or your Virtual CIO and ask them to construct a restore plan for you today…before it’s too late!

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