Why you need to make sure your data is safe, no matter what the risk, or where it’s saved.
In theory, most businesses should be able to bounce back if hit by fire, flood or a server crash, but the reality is that few manage a 100% recovery. One of the main reasons for this is that their backups don’t always work in the way they should. They can become corrupt, store the wrong data, or the list of systems backed up may not always be up to date.
Analysts Gartner calculates that between 10 percent and 18 percent of IT systems run 60 percent to 70 percent of business processes in most organisations. If these servers aren’t backed up regularly enough, then a business can fail.
“Worryingly, our estimate, based on the last five years’ experience of providing disaster recovery services to the small and medium sized business sector is that less than 50 percent of new companies have a backup that they could restore from within three days of an IT disaster,” says Neil Cornish, Managing Director at IBM Business Partner M7. “In fact, most do not have any documented recovery plan at all.”
This is probably because, as Cornish points out, anticipating what an IT disaster might look like is very difficult. “Most people think of fire or flood, they look at their building and think there’s little chance of either happening,” he continues. “But when was the last time you climbed up to check the roof of your building?
“One of our customers had nesting seagulls on their roof that, out of sight, pulled away the lead flashings. During a wet and stormy day water began to pour down the walls and into the computer room. This was not only dangerous, but resulted in all systems being shut down for days while the room dried out and the roof was repaired.”
There’s an old adage that says: “You never miss your water until your well runs dry.” This is certainly the case in IT. Computers have become the business wells of the modern age. Without IT, your business will not be able to function. IT is ingrained into every part of your company, from the PCs and laptops on your desk to the servers that run your ecommerce site. However, too many businesses don’t think about how they would survive should their IT fail, while even fewer consider how they would rebuild their systems and get everyone back up and running after the event.
Misplaced optimism
In a way backing up is just half of the story. The rest concerns maintenance and verification, and few businesses take this part of the problem seriously enough. A recent report by insurer Aviva revealed that companies were incredibly optimistic about the time it takes to recover from an IT disaster. Some 33 percent said predicted it would take them a week, and 31 percent estimated a month.
One of the key failings when it comes to business continuity is keeping your backup systems up to date. IT systems are not static. You add new servers, new devices, and build new applications all the time. But do you always immediately add them to your backup schedules? Backing up should be one of the tick-box items when installing any new piece of equipment onto your network, but it’s surprising how few businesses do this.
For example, in one of our recent case studies, a company had installed a new business intelligence (BI) system and was using it quite heavily. However, it was only after a year of using the service that the business added the system to its disaster recovery solution. The BI system had changed the way the company worked, and after a few months it had become a core part of the business, yet it wasn’t added to the list of applications on the backup server for months.
Restore and rebuild
The other key point to backing up is restoring the data. Too many businesses fail to consider how long this process will take, or if data can be restored to a working system. Robert Winter, Engineering Manager at data recovery specialists Kroll Ontrack, has plenty of experience in restoring systems and frequently finds that many of the problems stem from an inability to restore a working version of the system. “We find that many businesses are using snapshots to backup their systems,” he says, “and are then unable to rebuild their systems as it’s difficult to rebuild a disk properly from snapshots.”
The last part of the problem is what you restore your data to. Many backup systems assume that the data will be restored to the same device – or at least one of the same specifications. But what happens if your system is so old that it has become obsolete? You can happily backup your old 250GB storage systems, but when that system dies, you’ll need to restore the data to an identical device, or there are likely to be problems.
“Where the application is old and modified, the server environment is no longer sold or supported and you have changed lots of users since the last time anyone backed up the domain controller, it could be a week or more before you can recover these systems,” warns M7’s Cornish.
Thinking the unthinkable
It may seem time-consuming and expensive to ensure all your critical systems are thoroughly and regularly backed up, and that they can be effectively and quickly restored following an IT disruption, but surely the alternative is unthinkable.
“We try and encourage IT to ask the business users what they would do if they lost their systems,” says Cornish. “How long could they carry on working before they started sending people home or worse incurring penalties or losing orders?
“Can the business put a cost on hours lost? Would it survive a two-day outage? What happens if that was during the week? Understanding this helps determine the importance of IT to the business and how to assess the value of a coherent business recovery plan.
“Asking for a budget to implement a disaster recover strategy is a lot easier when the directors understand the risks and potential cost to the business by not having one.”
Neil Cornish
Managing Director
M7
IBM Business Partner
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