Brooklyn's Progress
January 2002

Two out of five enterprises that experience a disaster go out of business within five years. Business continuity plans and disaster recovery services ensure continuing viability. – Gartner Group, Sept. 12, 2001 Most businesses today define themselves by their intellectual property such as their people and their information and not just by their capital assets. No matter what industry your organization is in, you depend on immediate, secure and reliable access to critical electronic information such as financial records, customer information, payroll, proposals, e-mail, correspondence, accounts payable and receivable. Virtually all of this information is stored on computers – files servers, workstations and laptops. If this information is lost, so to is your business. There are many causes for loss of data to which all organizations are exposed. These include computer viruses, theft, hacking, users unintentionally deleting needed files, media failure where data can no longer be retrieved, environmental problems such as humidity and heat, and unforeseen site disasters such as fire, hurricane, earthquakes and terrorism. It is essential to protect yourself from these unforeseen causes of data loss by backing up your data on a regular basis. Full-system backup and data protection is all about protecting your data so that in the event of data loss you are able to get your information back to normal as quickly as possible so that you can get back to business. Tape, with its high capacity, speed, low cost, portability and disaster recovery capabilities provides the simplest and most robust solution to protect your organization’s electronic information. Additionally, there are offsite backup alternatives routinely used as a secondary part of a disaster recovery program. Here are some basic guidelines to follow when backing up your data to tape: The entire system, including the operating system, applications and settings must be backed up and not just personal files. This will greatly decrease the time to restore in the event of data loss. Backup strategies must now encompass desktop and laptop computers as well as servers. According to Gartner Group, 60-80 percent of company data may now reside on desktop and laptop PCs. Just backing up the server will not be enough to ensure that these files will be restorable. A disaster recovery plan should be thoroughly documented and should be made as simple and full proof as possible so that any employee would be able to implement the plan and not just your resident technology expert. The restoration of files from backup tapes must be tested on a regular basis to verify that your backups are working properly. Backup tapes must be stored in a secure and offsite location on a regular basis in order to prepare for circumstances where computer equipment may be damaged or destroyed. Disk Mirroring is not a substitute for backup. Although mirroring is a great supplement to a backup (in the event of a primary drive failure, the data will become instantly available from the secondary drive), it does not protect against most of the causes for data loss listed above. This article was prepared by The NetSys Group, a Microsoft Certified systems integration, network engineering and eBusiness solutions company. To learn more about The NetSys Group and how they can assist you in fulfilling your technology needs please visit their website at www.netsysgroup.com or contact them at 888-7-NetSys or by e-mail at info@NetSysGroup.com.