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Back-up and Recovery: A Critical Business Initiative
Dick Mulvihill, Co-Founder
Andrew Schmidt, Co-Founder
There are many terrific things about building a company from the ground up, and one of the best of these is that entrepreneurs starting new businesses can immediately benefit from the learning and best practices of the businesses that have come before—without the cost and disruption of undoing quarters and years of not-so-best practices.
This is particularly true when it comes to back-up and recovery.
Every business needs a business continuity plan.
When we hear the word disaster, we tend to think of devastating events like 9/11, Katrina, or ice storms in Oklahoma; however, the leading causes of data losses are:
- Hardware or system malfunction - 59%
- Human error - 26%
- Software corruption or program malfunction - 9%
- Computer viruses - 4%
- Natural disasters - 2%
As a start-up your company might not be able to do everything prudent to protect yourself from a catastrophic event like a flood or fire; however, it is the IT events that are most likely to derail your technology infrastructure. The good news is that there are affordable steps that thoughtful entrepreneurs can take with regard to operations recovery, IT, and data protection that can lay the foundation to make continuous operation, business resiliency, and real time recovery achievable.
Most young businesses have many priorities and are resource-constrained, and it can be a real stretch to identify the budget and expertise needed to build protective mechanisms to keep your company operating when an unplanned disruption occurs. The challenge is that the longer you wait and the more successful your business is, the more expensive and complex creating back-up and recovery processes becomes.
The words computer glitch or employee error may not sound as scary as “disaster,” but the effect on a business built on continuous operation, uninterrupted client service, or real time data availability can be just as debilitating, and these are the types of things that happen inside early stage companies every day.
Establish a business continuity plan that can expand as you grow.
The objective of business continuity planning is to recover mission-critical processes as quickly as possible following the disruptive event. Why? Because disruptive events can put companies out of business faster than any competitor.
The objective of business continuity planning is to recover mission-critical processes as quickly as possible following the disruptive event. Why? Because disruptive events can put companies out of business faster than any competitor.
- 43% of businesses suffering a disaster never recover sufficiently to resume business. Of those that reopen only 29% are still operating two years later.
- 93% of businesses that lost IT capabilities for more than nine days filed for bankruptcy within one year according to the National Archives and Records Administration.
- 50% of businesses that lost data for more than nine days filed bankruptcy immediately.
Corporate data is growing at 50 percent or more per year and is the most difficult of all infrastructure components to replace. For most high technology businesses, today’s competitive environment requires almost 100 percent data availability and access at anytime from anywhere, in part driven by Federal regulations that demand retention time frames of up to seven years with 24-hour retrieval for certain information.
Use technology to solve the problem.
When establishing a plan, the first thing that has to happen is that the company founders must accept that the need to protect data as a key corporate resource is second in importance only to that of retaining key employees. Founders and company executives must take the lead and communicate continuity planning as a priority.
The next step is to define the impact of a business interruption: what data is critical and what is the downtime tolerance for your business? How long your company can withstand an outage without losing significant revenue, market share, customer satisfaction, or reputation?
Start by estimating the downtime costs when employees, suppliers, and customers can’t access information. For example, think about how much your company relies on your email system. For many businesses, their email system has become more mission critical than most other applications. If your email system goes down how long can you wait for it to come back up— one minute, 10 minutes, or an hour? Once you have determined the impact of such an outage to your company you are in a better position to budget for data protection.
Finally, test everything. An actual outage is not the time to find kinks in the armor. Test plans are available on the Internet and should include working from another location, maybe changing hardware, and restoring data from backups. Try to run full-scale tests yearly and smaller test restores of data monthly.
Consider outsourced backup and recovery.
As in every other aspect of early stage operations, when it comes to back-up and recovery there are compromises and tradeoffs. You can prioritize the amount of data that you want to take off site and reduce cost by only backing up what is critical for the ongoing operation of your company. Prices for the kind of protection your company needs are probably lower than you expect, on average just a few dollars per month per gigabyte of data; however, budget with the understanding that your data will likely grow.
Online back-up is relatively new and the market is growing quickly. Today, there is far less of a differential between an online service versus tape as ubiquitous Internet connections can be used to reduce the cost of fully automatic offsite back-up while allowing companies the flexibility to restore to their location or to another within minutes of when an outage occurs.
Continuous Data Protection (CDP) provides finer recovery time than periodic backup solutions. It is possible to view a file or database as it existed minutes or even seconds earlier and to recover it almost instantly. More importantly, integrating CDP’s real-time capture and recovery capability with a disk-based Internet online backup service takes business resilience to the next level.
Onsite CDP backup tracks moment-by-moment changes to your data and those are then copied off-site when the nightly backup runs. Since all data is stored locally, restores are very fast, and if there is a major outage from fire or theft everything is remotely stored for automated recovery.
Benefit from developing best practices early on.
The success and cost effectiveness of a business continuity plan depends on close cooperation from all areas of the company and on the ability of management to view implementation as an essential element of daily business operations.
Business founders and owners have a fiduciary responsibility to protect a start-up company’s two primary assets—people and intellectual property. Unless company leaders take the time to investigate the most cost-effective solution for reliable back-up and recovery, the risks are fairly ominous.
However, once you make resiliency part of your company’s DNA and have solid protection and processes defined, you can operate with confidence when the unexpected occurs…and sooner or later it will. Dick Mulvihill has more than 31 years of sales and management experience in the data communications industry with start-up companies and market leaders.
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