CUSTOMER databases, accounts and records are critical to business and if this information is lost a company will grind to a halt.
The problem for many companies is that backing up information is often too complicated and expensive to do properly.
But Ruslan Kogan, founder of the online stores Kogan and Milan Direct has made it easy by storing everything the company does on servers on the internet, the so-called cloud.
He says while many IT managers see the cloud as risky he sees risk in having anything stored on the desktop of a computer because the information on it could be lost or stolen. In fact, company policy is that the 25-odd employees of Kogan and Milan Direct do not store anything on their desktop.
“We see it as a security issue, saving documents to the desktop of a computer or laptop. No staff member is allowed to keep anything locally on a computer.” If the computer is lost or stolen, the password to the data in the cloud is simply changed and only hardware is lost.
Each person in the company generates about 10 gigabytes to 20GB of data, making a total of 375GB to store, Kogan estimates, a comparatively small amount of data.
But according to David Markus managing director of Melbourne-based IT consultants Combo, working in and backing up to the cloud isn’t for every company. He says companies with large amounts of data may need a different solution as 1terabyte ( 1000GB) of data backed up to the cloud could take four to five days to restore to find one file.
“One day everybody will be working in browsers [in the cloud]. It’s coming. But it’s not here yet,” Markus says.
“People don’t really understand what’s going on,” he says. The problem is most people don’t understand what back-up is and simply replicate a server.” The problem is replicas of data may replicate software problems that may have compromised the data. “What is needed are multiple, different in time versions of data.” And some of this data is needed on physical drives and other parts off site.
Kogan does use physical back-up too. “We take it a step further with Blu-ray disks and external drives but we’ve never had to use them,” he says. “It’s for extra peace of mind.”
According to Dell, most small and medium businesses consider email to be the most mission-critical of their data for back-up. And now Dell and other companies are offering products that ensure email data is never lost.
“It’s really so you can have some sort of insurance on the data,” says Dell storage solutions consultant Mark Ransom. “The challenge for a small firm is the lack of IT staff.”
At Kogan, instead of email servers (computers) run by an email department, email is handled by Google apps (a free application suite) costing $US50 ($59) for each user on the domain. The company’s calendars and contacts are also stored in the cloud with Google. Manuals are stored in Google Docs. And all invoicing and accounts are run in the cloud and use a document management system that means any item can be located in seconds.
“It allows easy sharing between people, access to any file through any computer,” Kogan says. “The costs are tiny compared [with] doing it any other way. The efficiency, the amount you save in labour costs is huge. We can locate any document in seconds and we don’t need filing cabinets. I couldn’t imaging running a business that is not in the cloud,” Kogan says.
While Google and other cloud applications have watertight back-up for their computers, Kogan takes a belt and braces approach. In addition to his physical back-ups, he also backs data up to another company’s global array of servers and then back to Google.
Of course, all this back-up is useless without being able to connect to the internet and redundancy is built in to the company’s internet connection. It uses four independent ADSL connections and two independent 3G connections.
If these fail, Kogan can put staff in taxis and send them to internet cafes.
THE BACK-UP PLAN
Put a policy in place defining how frequently and with what you back-up.
The more frequent the back-up the more it costs.
Back-up is more than replicating a server or drive but involves multiple versions of data from different times.
Large amounts of data backed-up to the “cloud” may take days or weeks to restore.
Decide how far back can you afford to lose data and how long it should take to restore data.
Ensure off-site back-up in case of, for instance, fire.
If you use Google docs, calendars, contacts and email it is backed up for you.
Test the back-up in the first instance to ensure the data is there.
Back-up capacity should be at least the size of the data you need backed up plus 30 per cent.
Use tiered back-ups. For instance back-up to a disk weekly and leave for 30 days. Then archive to tape.
Best practice is to test back-up once a quarter
Large back-ups are best done over the weekend.
Full physical back-ups should be done monthly and kept for a year.