The easiest way to give a computer-savvy person a heart attack is to tell them you don't back up your data. Not backing up important information is a lot like driving a car without a seatbelt: You'll probably be fine 99.99 percent of the time, but that .01 percent could ruin your life.
In the same way, not investing in online backup services for important company data could be the death of a business when disaster strikes. Much like a seatbelt, you never really need your data backed up until you need it. And then you really need it.
But despite the fact that backup is a key component to making it through a trying time, it is certainly no replacement for an actual disaster recovery plan.
A backup horror story
Many people think that simply backing up data is the only thing necessary to deal with a troublesome event. This could not be further from the truth, and IT professionals at the Parish of Orleans Civil District Court in Louisiana can attest to this. On Oct. 25, 2010, both of the servers holing all of the conveyance and mortgage records for the courthouse crashed without any warning. Thankfully, the courthouse had paid for online backup services and had all of its data stored offsite.
Or so it thought.
As it turns out, the company that had been handling the online backup had sent out a software update to all of its clients a little while before the crash. Although the IT department at the courthouse believed that they had installed the update, it turned out that they had not. This resulted in the courthouse losing digital mortgage records from the past year.
Thankfully, paper copies did exist for all the lost data, but the point here is that this courthouse relied solely on data backup rather than having a good disaster recovery plan in place – and lost big because of it. Backup is a great first step toward planning for a disastrous event, but that's all it is: a first step. The next step, and perhaps the most important one, is developing a disaster recovery plan with a firm that specializes in them.
This is why ISG Technology is such an interesting and powerful ally. Specializing in both online backup services and disaster recovery, ISG allows businesses to combine both of these services into a protective shield to fend off business continuity problems.