Hopefully, everyone is taking backups of the key systems and servers that make your company run. It doesn’t matter if these servers are database servers, file servers, application servers, etc. If they are critical to running your business, then you need to back up those servers in case of some disaster, and those backups need to leave your facility.
I want to tell you a little story about a company that didn’t, and now they are trying to figure out how to get everything back. The names have been changed to protect everyone.
As many people know, I’m a big fan of Napa Valley and everything the companies there produce. We’ve been in many wine clubs over the years at many establishments. Earlier this year, we got an email from one of them saying we would need to re-sign up for their club because they had a fire at their offices and lost the membership list. How did they know to email us? I have no idea; I’m assuming someone had an Excel sheet with members’ names and email addresses on it on a laptop, or the email information was in MailChimp already (or some other bulk emailing system).
But the implication here was clear (as it should be to anyone working in the IT field) that their membership and billing systems were in-house, and literally in-house, and were lost in the fire. So, while they may have had backups of the system that tracks their membership and processes the payments for members (and I have no idea if they did), those backups were not being sent off-site in the event of a natural disaster. The office catching fire would qualify as a natural disaster. And because of the lack of backups being offsite, when there was a fire that destroyed their offices, they had no way of getting back the information that is critical to running their business, which is especially scary as a lot of the wineries in Napa sell the bulk of their product to their club members.
This should be a reminder to everyone in charge of IT systems that they need to make sure that backups are being done automatically and that those backups are being sent off-site either through an old-school method of physically moving the tape offsite or by copying the backups to a cloud provider like SQL Server offers using Backup to URL.
If you need help deciding which backup options are best for you, contact the team at DCAC. We’ll help you do so so that you can survive the next fire in your office (which we hope never happens).
Denny
One Response
WHEN I was an IT manager back in 1975-1985 we were using mag tape for backups in a 24-hour operation, do did tape backups over lunch hour and two of us took them home with us eack night in our cars. Also traded tape storage with folks in another similar shop a few blocks away from our location.