Posted on Fri, Mar 27, 2009
The Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) Act of 2002 legislates how long, and the manner in which, companies store their financial records. SOX is designed to safeguard against accounting errors and illegal financial activities. SOX specifically states that electronic records and messages (email/IM) must be saved for at least five years to ensure auditors and other regulators can easily obtain requested documents.
A remote backup company provides the infrastructure that ascertains compliance with the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, and will use data backup software that enables organizations to address SOX rules without the need for additional equipment or services such as tape libraries and offsite media storage. Storing financial records with a managed service provider who implements remote data backup solutions ensures critical data is secure and quickly assessable. Electronically transporting records, using industry standard encryption to secure offsite data backup locations where the data remains encrypted, minimizes the chance of unethical access or destruction of data. Generally, a remote backup company can help publicly traded businesses and companies (such as accounting firms) who conduct audits adhere to SOX by:
- Storing data at highly secure, offsite data backup locations;
- Ensuring that critical records and communications remain encrypted;
- Using disk-to-disk backup and retrieval, avoiding the hassles of backup tapes;
- Offering specialized remote backup solutions for storing, monitoring and archiving email and instant messages;
- Providing disaster recovery services and data loss protection.
When choosing a managed service provider, make certain that the data backup services provided fulfill requirements of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act as they relate to record retention, records production, internal controls, record alteration and destruction.
Fact: 20% of SMBs suffer a major disaster every 5 years.
Posted on Fri, Mar 20, 2009
Why is disaster recovery planning important?
Protecting your organization’s data is vital primarily because disasters within a business are inevitable and unpredictable. It is never known when an entire system will crash or if an organization will experience data loss from natural disasters, fire, system or equipment failure, viruses or human induced causes. Data is the heart of the business, so safeguarding critical company and customer information should be a top priority. Proactive disaster recovery planning is essential for all businesses that rely on data on a continuous basis and can make or break the future success of a business.
Many regulations govern data protection, and requirements to disclose lost data incidents can damage a corporation’s reputation. The cost of an outage that lasts only a few days is already bad enough. Contracts can be broken, credibility can be lost, and even future customers will never be acquired. These are extreme losses. Anything that prohibits you from efficiently carrying out your business practices can result in irreversible damages. Your customers expect for you to be there for them whenever they need you. If their expectations are not met, they may become your competitor’s most newly acquired customer.
What are the complexities in disaster recovery planning?
A sound disaster recovery plan involves backing up and archiving critical data and planning for the restoration of that data as rapidly as possible. What used to be fairly simple at one time has turned into an intricacy of distributed and networked computers, assorted hardware and operating systems, virtualization and automated external data feeds that have all significantly complicated disaster recovery planning. IT managers may find it very resource-intensive. Additionally, organizations must ensure the safety and security of their data, even in the event of a disaster, to comply with thousands of state and federal regulations that affect records management. All of that added to the increased customer expectations that downtime will be resolved almost immediately compound onto the pressure for a good plan.
How can disaster recovery with a remote backup company be beneficial?
The most efficient disaster recovery planning procedure comes with a remote backup company that offers offsite data backup solutions and disaster recovery service. Offsite data backup with a remote backup service provider offers the most beneficial and convenient setup for any business - no matter the size -through the automated processes, central management capabilities, 24X7 response time and integrated backup solutions.
No one knows when a disaster could strike and wipe out individual hardware, a complete system or an entire facility. A remote backup company provides regular backups of mission-critical data and allows you to backup to the file level in real-time right at your fingertips. Data restoration is quick and efficient, and the majority of your data is protected and spared.
It is much easier to come up with a disaster recovery plan than to have to deal with a crisis blind. Don’t allow your entire business to be at risk of being shut down due to something out of your control.
Facts:- According to research by the University of Texas, only 6% of companies suffering from a catastrophic data loss survive, while 43% never reopen and 51% close within two years.
- Gartner estimates that only 35% of small and mid-sized businesses have a comprehensive disaster recovery plan in place.
Posted on Thu, Mar 12, 2009
Before employing a remote backup company to provide offsite data backup services, make sure they host virtualization technologies for disaster recovery, which brings several benefits for small and medium businesses (SMBs). Among the advantages of virtualization are cost savings and flexibility in the installation of a disaster recovery solution. Put in a more simple way: virtualization can reduce the amount of hardware required at a disaster recovery site and simplify recovery operations. Moreover, virtual machines are independent of the physical hardware they are running on and are completely autonomous.
Virtualized disaster recovery solutions are based on replication and failover and often require a one-to-one pairing of production systems with disaster recovery operations. Due to inoperable issues with some server-based applications and the complexity of managing such a configuration, it is often not recommended or not possible to failover multiple physical workloads to a single operating system instance running on standard server hardware. As a result, organizations usually must purchase enough hardware for the disaster recovery site to handle production capacity or make sacrifices by choosing not to protect certain systems and applications.
By leveraging virtual systems as secondary servers in a standard replication and failover scenario, each virtual machine is its own self-contained, unmodified server image. These virtual machines can be operated simultaneously on a single piece of hardware, allowing many physical production servers to be protected in a disaster recovery facility. Since each virtual machine is self-supporting and workloads do not need to be consolidated, managing applications and services during the recovery process is no more difficult than managing them in production.
Generally speaking, a remote backup service provider which hosts a virtualized infrastructure delivers practical solutions for preventing and minimizing downtime by making effective disaster recovery simple and reliable. Virtualized solutions give SMBs the ability to:
- Build recovery infrastructure using existing servers, rather than installing identical duplicate servers for recovery.
- Cut operational costs related to power, cooling and infrastructure management.
- Do away with dependencies of recovery plans on physical server hardware.
- Eliminate planned downtime or service interruption for many types of maintenance by migrating running workloads to other servers.
- Make rapid disaster recovery attainable, rather than relying on time-consuming restoration from tape or disk backups.
- Extend disaster recovery protection to all critical systems.
- Increase availability across all applications independent of OS and hardware used.
- Minimize outages and unplanned downtime.
- Enable realistic, frequent tests of recovery plans without the cost and complexity of traditional disaster recovery testing.
Fact: The Underwriting Guide for Insurers by A.M. Best found that only 6% of midsized companies that suffer catastrophic data loss survive; 43% never reopen and 51% close within two years of the disaster.
Posted on Wed, Mar 04, 2009
The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) has complex requirements to improve the access and transfer of critical patient health records while maintaining strict data protection procedures. The federal government has mandated that health data security standards require healthcare providers to implement comprehensive security measures to ensure that electronic patient records are protected against data loss and unauthorized access. This calls for compliant data backup procedures to ensure the confidentiality of patient records regarding data backup transportation and storage. Healthcare providers who engage in electronic transactions must adhere to data privacy safeguards to protect sensitive customer information and health records. Using a remote backup company will help meet HIPAA compliancy through providing automatic and secure offsite data backup, along with on-demand data recovery in the event of a disaster.
Data loss can cause a loss of productivity, patients or other customers, and revenue. Organizations are obligated to have a business continuity plan to sustain operations in the event of data loss. It is mandatory to include details concerning the data backup and data recovery process, offsite data storage, turnaround time, and all other matters regarding data protection and recovery.
Remote backup service providers offer the following:
- Automated data backups at secure offsite location
- Controlled physical access
- Disaster recovery and 24x7 restoration
- No extra hardware to purchase or manage
- Low service costs compared to media
- Tiered storage solutions to mange long-term data
Implementing remote backup solutions should be a key component to following HIPAA compliancy policies. It is critical that the remote backup service provider is a leader in integrated technology disaster recovery and on-demand remote backup that offers a comprehensive tiered storage solution for long-term data archiving capabilities. Remote backup ensures the highest degree of compliance standards are met regarding policies set by state and federal regulations.
Fact: 48% of data security breaches are caused by hackers, while 52% are a result of company insiders.