Executive Summary
A recent study
discovered that, of companies experiencing a
“major loss” of computer records, 43 percent
never reopened, 51 percent closed within two
years of the loss, and a mere 6 percent
survived over the long-term For small and
medium-sized businesses (SMB’s) in
particular, these statistics suggest the
necessity of crafting a Business Continuity
Planning (BCP) strategy grounded in a robust
data backup and recovery solution.
Unlike enterprises, many smaller companies
cannot afford optimal in-house strategies
and solutions in service of BCP. These
companies are consequently at an elevated
risk of being put out of business due to any
major loss of data. Loss of data could mean
emails lost, accounting data lost, patient
or client files lost, company records lost,
client legal records or orders lost and so
on. This white paper evaluates the scope of
BCP for smaller companies, by examining
their challenges, range of existing
solutions and their drawbacks. We’ll also
discuss how our solution overcomes commonly
faced challenges to offer the most
comprehensive solution out in the
marketplace. |
Traditional Solution vs. Emerging Technology
Implementing a data-oriented BCP strategy first
requires designation of a specific data storage
medium. Magnetic tape and disks are the two
leading media for data backup storage. While
magnetic tape is currently dominant, analyst
Dave Russell of Gartner believes that “Recovery
will move to online disk-based storage in the
future. This will cause a major shift in the
backup market during the next four to five
years.”
Smaller Companies in particular will benefit
from the shift, as recent advances in design and
manufacturing lower the total cost of disk-based
storage in terms of storage per bit. Falling
prices, combined with the various performance
advantages that storage industry analysts cite,
render disk increasingly attractive. Gartner
Group highlights the suitability of disk for
these organizations by explaining that, “The
need for high-performance online recovery of
data, combined with the availability of low-cost
disk arrays, has influenced enterprises and
small and midsize businesses to adopt a
disk-based approach for backup and recovery.”
Tape, in contrast to disk, is physically
delicate and easily compromised by environmental
factors such as heat, humidity, and magnetic
interference. Moreover, tape cartridges must be
replaced frequently (every 6-12 months). Tape’s
innate sensitivity contributes to high failure
rates, with analysts estimating that anywhere
from 42 to 71 percent of tape restores fail.
Even when magnetic tape backups are successful,
tapes themselves are subject to loss or theft,
and may be in the possession of an employee or
vendor unable to reach a recovery site. Thus,
even when physical backup and restoration
processes succeed, tape may not prove to be as
timely and appropriate a medium for data storage
as disk. Time is a crucial consideration because
each hour of server, application, and network
downtime endured until data restoration comes at
a high cost, especially to smaller businesses.
Analyst Jon Oltsik of Enterprise Strategy Group
also points out that tape is seldom encrypted,
compounding the destructive impact of tape
theft: “Very few people encrypt backup tapes,
which means that they rely on the security of
the backup and off-site rotation process.”
Magnetic tape encryption, unlike disk
encryption, has historically been too costly for
all but large enterprises: “Encryption of any
data that is leaving the security of the data
center, in transit, has always been an option,
unfortunately, a very expensive option,”
explains Clipper Group.
Disk offers not only lower cost encryption but
also other advantages. In contrast to tape,
“disks are more durable, last longer, withstand
more overwriting and you don’t need to clean any
heads,” according to Rinku Tyagi of PCQuest.
Additionally, “When it comes to backing up using
disks, they are easier to manage. Disk backup
systems include management tools, often
browser-based, for you to easily configure
settings and check status from anywhere.”
HP enumerates other advantages of disk storage,
noting that “Data is backed up to disk much
faster than tape, which translates to less
impact on production server availability. Disk
is also a more reliable media than tape and less
prone to error, which translates to less failed
recoveries.” Clipper Group believes that the
superior speed of disk storage is an enduring
advantage: “High performance disk will always be
the choice for online applications that require
fast access.”
While disk offers advantages over tape, it is
not a panacea. After installing disk technology,
Companies will still be responsible for
monitoring and managing backup processes,
encrypting and safeguarding backed up onsite and
offsite data, restoring data to new hardware,
and other functions. Without implementing a
layer of governance over disk-based data backup,
these Companies court the danger of failed
backups and delayed restoration of data, thereby
jeopardizing their chances of successful
recovery from major data loss.
Smaller Companies unable or unwilling to invest
in the human expertise and infrastructure
support systems necessary for data-oriented BCP
can leverage our data backup and recovery
solution, which removes cost and complexity
burdens from your staff. |
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Business Continuity Planning for Small and
Medium Size Businesses
BCP is the blueprint
for how businesses plan to survive
everything from local equipment failure to
global disaster. Data-oriented BCP, an
indispensable component of business planning
regardless of organization size, poses the
following challenges. Smaller businesses
generally lack the in-house IT resources to
achieve these demanding planning, technical
and process requirements. Therefore, many
SMBs either neglect to implement any
data-oriented business continuity plan or
else approach data backup and recovery in a
sporadic, rudimentary fashion that fails to
conform to the best practices of BCP.
Call us today!
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A Complete Solution that addresses all of your
BCP Needs
Near Real-Time Backups: Our “Incremental
Forever” methodology captures all changes to the
initial image in increments of 15 minutes. The
Incremental Forever technology not only backs up
recent datasets but also allows end users to
reconstruct the state of their data as it stood
at the end of various 15-minute restoration
points. This level of forensic and auditable
data recovery may satisfy various regulatory
requirements (such as HIPAA and GLBA) for data
retention and data record reconstruction, and
also serves stakeholders such as supply chain
planners, warehouse analysts, auditors, and
legal counsel.
On-site Virtual Server: If any of your servers
fail, our server virtualization technology
embedded in the Network Attached Storage (NAS)
allows customer servers and applications to be
restored and rebooted within two hours. As you
may sometimes endure a wait of several days in
order to receive replacement servers from
vendors, your NAS can have your business up and
running. The NAS multitasks so that, even while
functioning as a virtual server, it can continue
to back up data from other devices plugged into
the NAS. Our technology thus allows you to
remain in business without any significant loss
of data backup, server functionality, or
application downtime.
A Complete Image: We generate an image of all
hard drive partitions via an agent, which is
warehoused on the NAS device physically located
at your location. The data is stored AES-256 bit
encrypted and compressed, reaching efficiencies
as high as 2:1. We employ a block-level, not
file-level, backup, which means that data is
captured at the level of 1s and 0s. Block level
data is raw data which does not have a file
structure imposed on it. Database applications
such as Microsoft SQL Server and Microsoft
Exchange Server transfer data in blocks. Block
transfer is the most efficient way to write to
disk and is much less prone to errors such as
those that result from file-level backups.
Additionally, block level backups are not
affected by open files or open databases. The
block-level image is an exact digital duplicate
of the on-site server
Intuitive and Flexible Restoration: A good
backup system should allow for quick and
flexible restores. Our solution allows for
recovery of files, folders, partitions,
mailboxes/messages, databases/tables using a
quick and intuitive process. In case of a
complete server failure we do support a bare
metal restore to new hardware which has a
different configuration, hardware and drivers as
compared to the failed server. Our 15-minute
incremental based backup allows restores to be
done from any point in time, allowing for
multiple versions of files, folders,
messages/mailboxes, database/tables to be
restored.
Secure Remote Storage: After imaging the servers
to which it is attached, the NAS device then
creates an independent 256-bit encrypted tunnel
and transmits the imaged data to a secure
offsite location where it resides in an
encrypted, compressed format. That remote site
then replicates again to an alternate data
center, creating a total of three copies of the
data in three geographically distinct regions.
Since the data is encrypted and only you have
the key, no one has access at any of the remote
storage facilities.
Transmitting data to a remote site is a key
component of BCP. It guarantees that, in case of
physical damage to the client’s network or NAS,
or even regional disaster, the data is safe in
uncompromised locations. Encryption is an
important step in the process of transmitting
data between the NAS and the remote sites,
because it greatly reduces the risk of data loss
incidents that plague magnetic tape and prevents
man-in-the-middle attacks during transmission.
We employ the 256-bit Advanced Encryption
Standard (AES) algorithm because it has never
been broken and is currently considered the gold
standard of encryption techniques and render
transmitted data immune to theft.
Secure, Bandwidth Throttling Transfer:
Transmission itself occurs over your Internet
connection, and can easily be configured to
minimize bandwidth consumption. Our NAS
leverages Adaptive Bandwidth Throttling, which
only utilizes unused bandwidth or allows us to
set an outbound limit. Our UDP based smart
transfer technology utilizes a host of
innovative algorithms to speed up data transport
and resume from failure. We can therefore
exercise fine control over the data imaging and
transmission processes.
24x7 Completely Managed Solution: Our 300-person
Network Operations Center (NOC) monitors your
NAS units and the attached servers 24/7. Failed
processes generate immediate alerts to our
engineers, who often remotely correct errors
within minutes of receiving notification. In
case of more serious NAS issues, we will conduct
repairs at your site. If any NAS units are
irreparably damaged or destroyed, we will
overnight ship replacements—pre-loaded with all
stored data—directly to your location.
Affordable Cost: We offer a pricing packaged
that is all inclusive of the complete backup and
disaster recovery service-with no hidden costs.
All your costs are bundled and include the NAS,
the Incremental Forever Methodology, file
restorations, file integrity checks, secure data
transmission and remote storage. |
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Understanding the risks of not having a
plan in place:
- Understanding
Regulatory Compliance requirements in your
industry. Regulations such as the
Healthcare Insurance Portability and
Accountability Act (HIPAA) and the Gramm-Leach-Bliley
Act (GLBA) and other laws- state and
federal.
- Understanding how
to mitigate the risk of losing vital
business data, such as customer records.
- Being aware of
the environmental hazards that the
business infrastructure is exposed to due
to your geographical location.
- Estimating time
it would take to build the business back
if disaster strikes without having any BCP
in place.
Technical Challenges:
- Identify the lowest-cost,
highest-performance data backup medium (tape
or disk) based solution and keeping abreast
with the latest and greatest in the
industry.
- Ensure that all backed-up data is
encrypted and otherwise safeguarded from
theft.
- Ensure that backed-up data can be restored
to different kinds of hardware.
- Ensure that data backup continues even
during active recovery phases.
Operational Challenges:
- Identifying what data to back up.
- Identifying how frequently to back up and
related costs and ROI.
- Retain the ability to recover not only the
most recent data, but also data from older
time horizons, such as past quarters and
years.
- Retain the ability to monitor and manage
the integrity of ongoing data backup
processes so that backup failures can be
diagnosed and remedied before adversely
impacting the BCP lifecycle.
- The need to hire Staff who can understand,
design, implement and keep a BCP running
24/7 and be available to get business back
in action after disaster strikes.
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