RenovoData Weekly Articles

Statistics show that once data loss hits, the problem is pervasive affecting various areas of the business.  The consequences can be devastating.  Research reveals that 93% of companies that experience significant data loss go out of business within a five year period; almost two-thirds of those companies go out of business within six months.  More than 75% of those companies that test their backup tapes have found problems with their tapes, while 100% of disks and tape drives eventually fail.

Data is your business' primary asset that can make or break business operations.  Confidential customer information, important financial records and proprietary product information are all major aspects of running a successful business on a day to day basis.  Each of these plays a significant role in the long-term viability of the company.

There is a positive correlation between the advancement of technology and risks to your business.  Hardware and system malfunctions, viruses, hackers, software corruption and natural disasters can all attack your business' mission-critical data.  In a best case scenario, the downtime for your business will only last for several hours or even days.  At worst, the data loss can cause you to shut down operations completely and go out of business.

Think of remote backup companies as analogous to a bank safety deposit box where you would keep your most valuable personal items and documents in a safe place away from theft, vandalism or natural catastrophes.  Similarly, you should store sensitive data most critical to your business with a remote service which specializes in encrypted and automated offsite data backup and disaster recovery.

Consider the types of data listed below that a remote backup provider would manage.  What would data loss in any the following areas mean to your business?

• Accounts receivable and other information that manages revenue generation

• Accounts payable and other data that shows your company's cash flow

• Proprietary information

• Customer databases that allow you to provide client services and maintain your competitiveness in the industry

• Data that could result in additional costs such as employee downtime

• Government regulated data

Hire a remote backup service company for data protection and feel assured that your data will be secure, most information will be fully restored and your business will maintain operations in the event of data loss.

Fact:  According to National Archives & Records Administration in Washington, 93% of companies that lost their data center for 10 days or more due to a disaster filed for bankruptcy within one year of the disaster; 50% of businesses that found themselves without data management for this same time period filed immediately.

As the world stood still and focused on the historical inauguration of President Obama, there quietly came news of the largest single data infringement in history.  Heartland Payment Systems, which processes payments for over 250,000 businesses, may have compromised potentially hundreds of millions of credit and debit card transactions, making it one of the most significant data breaches ever reported.  After calling the U.S. Secret Service and hiring two breach forensic teams to conduct an investigation, it was found that malware planted on the company's payment processing network was the source of the data breach.

The decision to release the news of the breach could be viewed as a way to cover up the magnitude of what had taken place, or to avoid negative press.  Although this information was not immediately publicized when Heartland initially became aware of the problem in 2008, there will be lots of attention that brings it to light once the inevitable law suits arise.  In similar news, USAJobs.gov and Monster.com are two other high profile cases that were targeted by hackers, who stole large volumes of customer data via an automated and malicious Trojan-horse program. 

If these incidents are beginning trends indicative of 2009, data loss prevention and information security should be on the top of every IT to-do list.  A failure to secure the data of the customer is apathetic amongst enterprises and could be seen as gross incompetence, resulting in the collapse of the business following litigation and loss of revenues.  Data is the most important entity that can make or break a company.

Traditional methods of data storage using memory sticks, tapes, CDs, and hard drives are no longer secure.  Using tape (the most common) as a data backup or disaster recovery solution poses a serious threat; as tapes often have to be transported to an offsite storage facility.  While in transit, the tapes might be damaged, lost, misplaced, stolen or inadvertently discarded.  To make matters worse, most of the time the data is unencrypted.  Encrypting data ensures its safety and protection in the event of theft or data loss.

Use a remote backup service provider who has expertise in disaster recovery consulting as the most reliable solution for data breach prevention and backing up sensitive information.  The virtual management provided by a remote backup service provider allows for endless storage capacity and server consolidation.  Most importantly, data is sent directly to an offsite storage vault where it is compressed and encrypted and guaranteed confidential, safe and secure. 

Fact:  According to a report by TrendMicro, annual computer virus damages to U.S. businesses total $55 billion.  Even equipped with the latest antivirus software, viruses continue to pose a serious threat to your most valuable business asset.

The online blogging service, JournalSpace.com, has learned a hard lesson on the importance of reliable backup after the drives that housed their entire database was destroyed.  It was reported that the bloggers behind JournalSpace depended on a dual-disked mirrored RAID (Redundant Array of Independent Disks) system as their backup solution.  The problem with this is:  their backed up data was never truly backed up.  The rationale was if the primary drive fails, the secondary drive was thought to recover the primary drive.  However, this was a risky way of doing business in that it only provides protection from one drive.  While the RAID mirror technology would prevent the company from collapsing in the event of a single disk failure, it cannot prevent data loss due to software malfunction or disaster caused by external forces.  In the case of JournalSpace, it is speculated that a single individual was responsible for the data loss, sabotaging key servers that caused other servers to follow suit (maybe this is where “redundant” comes in).  Once the data was gone it could not be recovered even by a data recovery company since through a RAID system, when a file is wiped out from one drive, it’s automatically deleted from the other.  And to think:  this company relied on this method as backup for 6 years!

JournalSpace learned at a very high cost the reasons why the mirroring capacity through one of the many RAID configurations is not a sufficient substitution for secure backup.  If JournalSpace would have used a disaster recovery and offsite backup provider, the data would have been saved  and the business would still be operating.  A major benefit of an offsite backup solution is that generations of backup are housed through the tiered architecture whereas if there is a corrupted file, the offsite solution will “rewind” the version of the draft before the damage hits.  In this instance, the company will not only have the benefits of full disaster recovery and business continuity, but also will be further protected from being a victim of data corruption.

Fact:  According to a report by the Gartner Group, 100% of disks and tape drives eventually fail.  Are you safe in knowing you have a reliable disaster recovery plan in place?  Share your thoughts and comment below.