We are in the IT managed services business. (This means we help companies to outsource their IT to us.) Anyway, the IT side of the business has us in many offices of companies of all sizes between 20 and 250 computer users. You would not believe the number of sales calls we go on and hear that the reason the prospective client is looking for a new IT company is the complete and total data loss they just experienced with their current provider.
It happens like this:
- The company has (what they think) is a competent IT provider.
- The company is being told they are being backed up.
- They company has been told their RAID-5 disk array will protect them from hard drive failure.
- A drive fails.
- A sub-contractor of the server manufacturer shows up (under supervision of their IT company)
- Nobody knows how, but all of a sudden the data is lost
- The backups are found and won’t restore
- The company has lost everything
It’s not unusual for us to see this in one to two companies per month.
Look, tape doesn’t work. It’s the same technology that the hippies of the 1960′s used to record their music. Would you trust your iPod to tape? Worse, one of the potential clients we just met with lost all their data and they were backing up to removable disk cartridges.
The only thing that works is enterprise class, online, off site, automatic backup.
If you never want to lose your data, it only takes three things…
1. Develop the mindset that you will not rest until you see all of your servers restored to current working status on backup machines. This means…you take a fresh machine…install your backups over it…and EVERYTHING…hardware, software, users, everything…comes right back up and working. Depending on your comfort level with the first time you try this, you may want to repeat monthly, quarterly, or yearly — but in any event, regularly.
2. Understand that you will not do this successfully 100% of the time unless your data is always being moved off site without humans to change tapes, disks, or whatever. People fail. You must automate this process and have multiple humans watching over your backups to ensure that they are running…and you can not rely on people to never ‘forget’, ‘make a mistake’, ‘get sick’, or come up with an even more creative excuse.
3. Make sure that your backup provider understands your technology — if you’re a Microsoft shop, you need a Certified Partner. Bringing servers back from the dead isn’t intuitive or easy — unless you have experienced experts. If your backup provider is not also a competent IT provider, they may hand you a USB hard drive full of data and have no idea how to help you get everything back up and running after a restore.
If you haven’t moved forward with a provider, (or even if you have and they are not doing much to help you build comfort that you will be able to restore your data), fill out the form below.
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