Backup and Disaster Recovery

NST has been providing Backup and Disaster Recovery (BDR) planning, strategies and solutions for effectively protecting critical information and providing businesses the ability to continue or quickly resume operations in the event of serious data loss.  What do we mean by "operate"?  We mean the ability for you and your staff to do business; access files; enter transactions; send and receive e-mail; provide customers with price quotes and other revenue generating services; etc. 

It is hard to open any discussion on Backup & Disaster Recovery without invoking images of all kinds of catastrophic events, such as 9/11 or Hurricane Katrina.  But the truth is data disasters happen, and for much more mundane reasons.  Search the Internet for information about data loss and here are some of the facts you will uncover:

• A single incident of data loss costs businesses an average of $10,000, according to a Price Waterhouse Coopers survey
• 78% of all data disasters come from hardware and system failure
• 11% of data loss can be attributed to human error
• 7% is due to software corruption from viruses and hacking
• Less than 1% of data loss is due to events such as hurricanes, acts of terror, and such
• The balance is made up of other miscellaneous items like employee theft and sabotage

Will this happen to you?  We certainly hope not!  But…are you prepared?  If you came in tomorrow and your server crashed or your data was wiped out by a virus or simple malicious act of a discontented employee, would your business survive?  What would you do?  How would conduct business?  What would you do with your employees simply sitting, potentially for days, with very little to do?  How would you sell or otherwise assist your clients?  What would the TOTAL impact be? 

Well, you have the cost of your employees; a company with 20 people at an average salary of $35K + benefits incurs hard costs of $3,360 per day.  Then there’s lost revenue, lost goodwill and other intangible items.  We were introduced to a new client under these circumstances.  It was a 15-person law office that had a failed server.  They had backup tapes, but these were not usable.  By the time we were able to recover their data and get them operational again - 10 days later - with a new server and all of their applications and data reinstalled, they estimated the total cost of this incident to be well over $80,000.

Even if you have a tape backup in place, are you covered?  Maybe…maybe not.  Users don't typically know how to check if backups have been running properly.  Even if they faithfully swap the tapes every day, they have no idea if a tape holds a good backup.  Do your tapes leave the site, or are they sitting near the server?  If you have a fire in the server room, say "bye-bye" to your backup.  Are the tapes actually being changed?  Many companies start well and with great intentions, but soon we find that tapes are rarely changed.  Was your last test restore successful (if you are among the 34% of companies that test their backup)?  77% of companies that do test their backups find errors and complete backup failures.
If tapes aren't so good, what is?  The NST BDR Device.  This is a newer technology that provides an incredibly effective Backup and Disaster Recovery/Business Continuity Solution.  The goal of this solution is to help a company survive a data disaster and resume normal business operations within a reasonable time frame.  The major benefits of the NST BDR are:

• Lack of need for client intervention after setup; it is an automated process . 
• NST monitors the BDR to ensure backups are complete, and we periodically run integrity tests on the data and perform test restores.
• Complete server images; full server snapshots that can be restored to "bare metal", and to different hardware
• Frequent incremental imaging: snapshots that update in specific intervals, as often as every 15 minutes, backing up only the changes since the last backup
• Option for images to be sent to a secure offsite location
• Ability for the backup device to quickly become a virtual server to be used when the physical server is being repaired or replaced
• Easily restore individual files, folders and Exchange mailboxes
• Ease of restore when physical server repair or replacement is complete

Now that you understand the difference between simply backing up your data and effectively protecting yourself from data disasters, we would be happy to discuss how this planning would be relevant for you and your business.