Tenshi Web Solutions How To Sell Web Accessibility
Whether you’re a billion dollar financial services firm or a twenty-person regional service provider, you are probably increasingly dependent on your data for your day-to-day operations. But the deluge of major virus attacks, multi-city power outages and natural disasters, combined with the less publicized problems such as equipment failures, network interruptions or simple human error - all add up to major risks to protecting your business’s critical information.
New factors that have increased data protection risks include:
- The exponential growth of business information generated every day means even more and more data has to be backed up
- Customers expect services to resume rapidly after a business disruption - regardless of the circumstances
- The increasing need to access data almost around the clock has dramatically shrunk the time permitted to backup data.
Today’s data protection challenge poses substantial risks to companies of all sizes, but they pose the greatest risk to small and midsize businesses.
Small and Midsize Businesses Data Protection Issues
- Limited IT resources for backup and recovery. Many small and midsize businesses have little or no dedicated IT personnel to respond quickly to business interruptions.
- Critical data all on one server. If that server goes down, most offices have to get that server running and fully restored ASAP, or face costly consequences.
- Regulatory pressures. Small and midsize businesses are subject to the same data availability and data protection requirements as large corporations for regulations such as HIPAA, Sarbanes-Oxley and SEC Rule 17 – but without the big budgets to meet these requirements.
- Cash flow disruptions even more damaging. Business disruptions that can’t be quickly recovered from can quickly start to imp act cash flow – something few small and midsize businesses can afford.
According to Gartner, "50% of all small and midsize businesses will go out of business within three years if they can’t get back their data in 24 hours."
What can a small or midsize business do to minimize this huge risk to their business? Here are six tips every small and midsized business can use to more effectively protect their critical data - and recover faster from downtime.
Tip One: The 3 P's - Think about People, Policies & Priorities First
Before worrying about the technology, you first have to have the right people, policies and procedures in place. One individual in your company should be designated as the "data protection owner".
This person should be responsible for getting management buy- in, documenting the processes, investigating the options, and directing the testing and training. The "data protection owner" should form a group to determine what is the most critical information to the business. This small group should include those individuals whose input will ensure that the most critical business information is protected.
In a small business, this may be just the owner, or the executive staff. In a midsize business, a manager from each function is probably most appropriate. The "data protection owner" should identify any relevant regulations that affect the company's data protection priorities.
Next, the group should define the critical applications. Given the limited resources in most small and midsize businesses, we recommend that you initially narrow your focus to the one or two core applications where an inability to access key information can quickly start to cost you money. Is it your e-commerce site? Your customer database? Your e- mail system? Initially focusing on data protection for just your one or two most critical applications makes your most important data protection goals more attainable.
Tip Two: Get Your Data Out of the Building
It is extremely important that you get your data out of the building and out of harm’s way. The ideal offsite location is distant geographically, so it remains unaffected by large-scale natural disasters, such as earthquakes and hurricanes.
Consider what the most likely threats are to your place of business.
- Is it local power outages? Then how far away would you need to store the data to be on a different power grid?
- Is it earthquakes or hurricanes? Then, you probably need to keep the backup data at least an area code away.
- Is it most likely to be server failures? Then what could be done for more rapid recovery of the production machine?
Think creatively about how you can cost-effectively backup the data remotely. For example if your office is in London and your IT administrator lives in Berkshire, you could simply setup a PC backup server in his or her home that is connected to the main server by DSL or cable.
Tip Three: Calculating The Costs of Downtime
For your peers to appreciate the gravity of the problem, you may need to estimate the downtime costs for employees, suppliers and customers not being able to access the critical information. The following method provides a simple way for you to conservatively estimate the average cost per hour of downtime for each critical application.
Productivity Impact + Revenue Impact = Downtime Estimate
Productivity Impact: Average worker rate or salary x estimated number of business hours the users would be impacted
Revenue Impact: Average monthly gross revenue for the critical application x number of business hours the application is impacted
Tip Four: Think Beyond Tape Backup to Achieve Your Objectives
For small and midsize businesses whose critical application runs at multiple remote locations (such as retail stores or bank branches) the quality and consistency of on-site tape backup is an issue. Few companies of any size have the technical experts in branch locations who can check that the tapes are properly backing up, maintain and clean tapes, and execute a recovery.
New solutions based on asynchronous software-based replication can achieve acceptable response objectives for small or midsize business’ critical applications - without the cost and complexity of the synchronous replication approach. With software-based replication, only the bytes that are actually changed by each write (not the entire block of information or the whole file) are replicated. When compared with synchronous replication solutions, this approach offers lower load on the production servers, faster updates, and the ability to send replication updates across low-bandwidth Internet networks.
Tip Five: Make it Easy for Users to Restore Themselves
If you are like most small and midsize businesses, you probably don’t have the IT resources to respond to individual requests to restore files. You can’t afford to have an IT administrator who spends the many hours it usually takes to retrieve and mount a tape, and recover individual files.
Fortunately, there is software integrated into server packages that make it easy for users to restore files themselves. For example, Microsoft’s Windows Storage Server 2003 can be configured to take a snapshot of the data on a server twice a day for example. Should a user delete or make undesirable changes to a document, they can simply select the file from any desired snapshot. It’s as simple as right clicking on the file, selecting “Properties”, viewing all the versions of the file and selecting the one they want.
Tip Six: Make Sure You Really Can Restore in Different Scenarios
It’s important to make sure you have thought through how you would quickly restore your critical applications - either locally or at a different location. Do you have (or can you quickly get) all of the components you would need to recover?
What would be the specific steps you would need to take to restore a failed server? What would you do if you had to move the company’s operations and people to an alternate set of servers at another location?
Conclusion
Like major corporations, small and midsize businesses are increasingly reliant on the critical data stored on their servers. But because of their limited resources and their greater vulnerability to interruptions, small and midsize businesses are even more at risk. In the past, small and midsize businesses often had to live with this greater level of risk. This is no longer true.
By implementing the tips suggested in this white paper, and by leveraging new software, you can significantly reduce your company’s downtime risks.
