How Often Should You Back Up Files?

Rudimentary data protection can be a business life-saver.

It’s a call no business owner wants to get — a fire broke out overnight in the industrial park where your office based, reducing it to smoldering rubble. Sure, you’re thankful no one was inside, plus insurance should cover the physical damage — but what about your company’s critical computer files?

According to ADR Data Recovery, U.S. businesses lose more than $12 billion per year because of data loss due to hardware or system failure (which accounts for roughly 78 percent of all data loss), software corruption, natural disasters, or human error.

“Data loss, and the downtime suffered from it, can cause considerable damage to your business,” says analyst Bob O’Donnell, program vice president for clients and cisplays at IDC, an Internet consultant. “And if you do any kind of commerce and your current orders are lost, it can prove to be a serious blow to your business revenue.”

The only absolute protection against losing critical information on your PC is to proactively back-up important files on a regular basis.

DIY or Automatic?

Backing up your files can be handled automatically, thanks to the many scheduled onsite or offsite back-up programs available today; or manually, where it’s up to you to select which files to back-up and where to back them up to, either burned onto a recordable CD or DVD, USB memory stick, or, preferably, uploaded to a secured offsite location in case of fire, theft, or natural disasters. Backed-up discs may also be stored in a safety deposit box.

What Gets Backed Up

Each business has its own particular needs and interests, but across the board, all businesses share the common need to back up customer data, contact information, and passwords. Individuals may want to add to that list: work files such as documents, spreadsheets, presentations, Web site code, as well as calendar appointments and e-mails.

A sales office will want to make external copies of its detailed CRM files. An architect will save blueprint sketches and 3-D renders.

Deciding what to back-up is as easy as asking yourself what is irreplaceable. In some cases, the data could be recoverable, but it may cost your business money, time, or embarrassment to retrieve everything from external sources. Let’s face it — asking one of your most important clients to re-send contact information or contracts could be damaging to your relationship.

“Data loss can ruin your reputation with clients or customers,” says O’Donnell. “Because you never know when data loss can strike, back-ups should be automated and stored off-site, so you can concentrate on growing your business.”

What’s the Frequency?

Some software packages — many of which are available as a “try before you buy” download atwww.download.com — automatically back up your information at a select time every day or week.

But if you’re handling the back-up manually onto a CD-RW disc or USB thumbstick, it’s recommended you back-up important information at least once a week. This includes files such as key work documents and files, business contacts, and appointments.

If you’re working on an important document, such as a sales report or a presentation or spreadsheet, it’s not a bad idea to keep a USB memory stick inserted into the PC’s USB port to make a back-up after the work is completed. This is especially a good idea for mobile professionals working on laptops — all it takes is for you to leave your PC on a plane, in a hotel or in the back of a cab and your critical data could be gone forever.

One Million Reasons to Backup

At a recent event I was talking with the director of a 10 person non-profit, and she mentioned an important database she was trying to convert to a newer format. "Where is it kept?" I asked. "On my computer" she said. "Where else?" And then I got that look — the look that says "what do you mean — where else?" Ah. How much would it cost to replace that data? Perhaps a million dollars, which is her approximate annual fundraising income. So one more time, for you folks who have not done so — Back up your work. Please.

Google engineers did a scientific study (it's a PDF) of failure in consumer grade hard disks and found that over 56% of drives that failed didn't raise any concerns using their built-in error checking hardware. What does this mean for you? Well, when your hard disk's time is up you probably won't know it until it happens. Which is why you should back up constantly.

Jennifer Walzer, President of BackupMyInfo.com, a New York-based service provider for small business backup, told me that a common problem is "People will set up a backup — tape, CD, extra hard drive, online - and they think it is great, only to find out that it hasn't been running right. They are not testing to make sure it works. We do hand holding and monitor to ensure backups run every day."

Recently, she had a customer who runs a party and event-planning business lose 10 years worth of Quickbooks data when the owner's computer crashed. They were able to restore to another computer in the office in seconds.

"We keep multiple versions of your data and we don't delete what you delete on your side until you specifically ask us to," said Walzer. Small business can backup their offices for $55 to several hundred dollars a month. However, this is a higher level of service than a simple desktop backup, with 24 hour support.

For those looking for more simple solutions, SugarSync, Carbonite, and Mozy are very popular choices. Drew Garcia, VP of Product Management of Sharpcast, makers ofSugarSync, told me "We have lawyers, contractors, real estate developers, graphic designers, and they have important data backed up, plus they use other features such as road warriors relying on the mobile app via Blackberry, iPhone, or Windows Mobileto get their documents on the go."

Sugar Sync has real time sync — you make a change to a document and it is immediately uploaded to the cloud. Some graphic designers use sharing functionality to show work to clients via a browser. This sharing can be "View only," or permissions can be set to allow collaborators to download a document, change and re-upload it. This sharing can be done among employees or with those outside the company.

Garcia is hearing road warriors adopt Netbooks, and they use Sugarsync to sync important files from their main computers, edit them, and sync back.

The three solutions mentioned above allow backup of a certain amount of data at a fixed price. For those working with Windows and Office 2007,http://www.officelive.com gives you up to 5GB of free storage for Word, Powerpoint, Excel files. With an add-in, you can save directly from these programs to your online storage area and you can access the files anywhere there's a net connection and a browser.

Don't end up like the presenter I saw at a conference last week whose laptop had been taken from the coatroom at the reception the night before. She was lucky she had emailed her slides to the conference organizer. Please backup. Go do it now. Share your tips for backup via the comments.

Does File-Sharing Threaten Your Sensitive Data?

Whether your employees are using peer-to-peer technology to download the latest game or video or to share work-related documents, their actions may place your data and your organization at risk.

When debit cards first came out, says Internet encryption pioneer Taher Elgamal, people simply scrawled their pin numbers on the back of their cards.

He sees many businesses taking the same sort of naïve approach to security these days when it comes to file-sharing and peer-to-peer networks. Too often, businesses haven't thought through the risks involved in file-sharing. And like those early debit card users, employees often are thinking simply of convenience and ease of usage.

Yorgen Edholm, president and CEO of Accellion, a company that provides secure file transfer solutions, agrees that businesses have been slow to react, despite continued news reports about data breaches. "One of the things that surprises me is it's still such an under-discussed topic,'' says Edholm. "Two years from now, it's going to be, 'How did we do that?'"

How P2P threatens your data

In February, the Federal Trade Commission notified nearly 100 organizations and businesses that had released sensitive information about customers, students, or employees through file-sharing or P2P networks. The government agency also announced it was conducting investigations of other businesses which had exposed data through file-sharing. In conjunction with the announcement, the FTC published new educational materials for businesses.

The risk to your data from P2P technology is a two-pronged threat. Employees are placing critical data at risk by using P2P technology to transfer and to share work-related materials. However, as people become accustomed to moving much of their lives online, they often blur the distinction between work and home activities. Employees downloading the latest movies and music from file-sharing sites also create risk for their employers.

Among the dangers:

• Inadvertently sharing files. Users may accidentally save a confidential file to a folder that is shared on a P2P network or malware could change the designation of  a folder or drive where sensitive information is stored.
• Opening your network to attacks. Malware in P2P programs can lead to attacks on other computers on your network, not just the computer sharing files.
• Losing track of data. Once files are placed on a P2P network, they may be shared among other computers even after deletion on the original computer. So, retrieving and securing data you've unintentionally exposed is virtually impossible.
• Remote storage of illegal material. Malicious programs could open one of your computers to storage of stolen documents or even child pornography, cautions Randy Abrams, director of technical education for anti-malware vendor ESET.

The threat is so significant Abrams thinks P2P programs should be avoided. "Peer-to-peer file-sharing programs have virtually no place in a business environment,'' he says. "The security of the programs varies widely. However, in many cases, the default settings are not the most secure. The risks of P2P file-sharing are too great to be ignored."

While every organization is vulnerable, Sanjay Mehta, senior vice president for security solution company Breach Security, advises that your company may be particularly susceptible to P2P threats. "In many ways, small to mid-sized businesses are great targets,'' he says. Mehta notes that smaller businesses often aren't equipped with the IT assets or the staffing to evaluate P2P risks or combat data breaches that occur through file-sharing.

How you can protect your data

Like most technology-related security issues, the first steps you should take involve people rather than machines or software, say the experts. Smart business practices will go a long way toward avoiding file-sharing data losses. Make sure your organization follows this checklist:

• Establish and enforce a file-sharing policy. Awareness is critical. Your policy should spell out in non-tech speak whether you'll allow the use of P2P networks. If you allow file-sharing, you should  explain the circumstances under which it is permitted and whom you authorize to do so. Once you've created a policy, revisit it frequently since technology evolves quickly. Educate your users.
• Offer file-sharing solutions. "Ninety percent of employees just want to get their work done,'' says Elgamal, chief information security officer for Axway, which secures and manages business transactions. "Generally speaking, people like the path of least resistance. We need to tell people how the company is enabling them to do business. You can't sit down and say 'no, no, no.' Then what?"  Your employees will find ways to share documents and files when they need to get the job done, so anticipate their needs and find secure solutions.
• Classify documents. Establish a system for classifying information based on how it can be shared or the sensitivity of the data, advises Mehta. Then, arrange information in locations based on whether it can or can't be shared. Consider a separate server or network for secure information.
• Classify users. Evaluate access and who should or shouldn't be sharing information. Consider whether you'll allow home computers on your network, an option Abrams advises against. "The cost/risk ratio of allowing personal computers on a corporate network, even for small companies, cannot be justified,'' he says.
• Purchase help. Look for a vendor solution that helps you safely secure file transfers, log transfer activity, archive files that have been transferred and filter what goes into and out of your network. Accellion charges a couple of thousand dollars a year for a subscription covering 25 to 50 users, Edholm says.

Most important, says Mehta, is taking action now.  If you visited the problem of file-sharing a year ago, it's time to look again. "The threat factor moves a heck of a lot faster than every so often," Mehta says.

Is it Time to Toss Your Servers?

Some small and mid-sized businesses should consider getting rid of their servers altogether, some experts argue. New Web-hosted computing options can dramatically reduce your hardware needs.

Abaca Technology Corp., which launched in 2005, offers physical and virtual anti-spam appliances. The company uses Amazon’s EC2 cloud computing service to host the software that works with its appliances. Without EC2, it would have been much harder — and much more expensive — to launch Abaca, according to Bill Kasje, vice president of Business Development. “As a small company, we were able to get our servers up and running quickly,” he says. “We didn’t have to invest in a big infrastructure environment, or have backup power and redundancy, all the things our customers expect from us because email is a mission-critical application.” Though Abaca does deploy in-house servers, it would need at least four more, in a cluster configuration, if it were hosting its software in-house, he says. This way, Abaca’s IT team could focus on the company’s core competency: filtering spam.

For many small companies, the smorgasbord of newly available off-site or “cloud” computing offerings means they can reduce the number of servers they purchase and maintain in-house. In fact, according to James Staten, principal analyst as Forrester Research, they may no longer need servers at all.

“There are now options available over the Internet that didn’t exist before,” he explains. For instance, companies used to use servers for file sharing, but there are many Internet-based options such as Microsoft Windows Live, Dropbox, and so on, that provide the same options over the Web. “Backups can be done over the Web too,” Staten adds, “and it looks almost exactly the same as when you back up to a server. A lot of people have print servers, but that’s not really necessary any more either, with today’s network-based printers, or wireless-enabled printers with built-in print servers.” In fact, Staten believes, many small companies no longer need any in-house servers at all.

Better without servers

Why reduce or eliminate servers? “The number one advantage is it gets you out of the IT business,” Staten says. “You don’t have to worry about high availability.” [A high availability configuration ensures continued function by connecting two or more servers in a cluster so that one can “fail over” to the other in case of a problem.] You no longer need to worry about off-site backups, emergency power supplies, or how your company would preserver its data in a widespread disaster like a hurricane, since all these protections are now provided by an off-site by a service provider, and defined in your contract.

You can also get by with fewer IT staff, Kasje says. “We would have to have IT staff monitoring systems around the clock. All we have to deal with are the software issues, so that’s much easier. There is a whole class of problems we don’t have to address.”

Not having servers on site means much lower upfront costs, though it also means ongoing costs to pay for a service or server space. “You’re trading capital expense for operating expense that you can adjust up or down, depending on your needs,” Staten says. And while the day-to-day costs may be similar, or perhaps lower for owned equipment amortized over several years, off-site servers can provide lower cost if you take risk into account. “There are so many more things to account for,” he says.

Three off-site options

For companies that want to cut their server count and turn to Web-hosted options instead, there are three different basic options to choose from:

• Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) In this approach, an application is provided by a SaaS provider and runs on its servers. Your employees (or customers) use the Internet to log into the software. Well-known examples include Salesforce and Google Documents.
• Hosted servers In this approach, you contract for server space — or even an entire (real or virtual) server at your provider. In many ways, you can treat this off-site server as if it were a regular server, loading applications and data onto it as you see fit. However, the hosting provider maintains the server, usually providing backups, security protections and such.Rackspace and Hostway are two examples of this approach.
• Raw cloud space “Cloud” is a relatively new term that is often used to describe any Web-hosted offering. Strictly speaking, it simply refers to the architecture by which software and/or data reside in a network or “cloud” of servers connected by the Internet, rather than on a single machine. You can lease raw space in the cloud, for instance, from Amazon’s EC2service.

In this setup, you are still responsible for managing your own server space. If your provider had an outage, in the case of SaaS, the application would be up and running as before once the outage was over. In a hosted server setting, the provider would restore data on the servers, providing the configuration you had before the outage. In a cloud computing outage, once the outage was over, your IT staff would need to reconfigure and reload your online server with the applications and data that were there before. You would be responsible for ensuring backups, and also the security of your data.

Because of these added tasks, Staten doesn’t recommend pure cloud computing for small companies unless they also have solid in-house IT expertise. On the other hand, he says, “If you’re really tech savvy, these are great new options to avoid ever having a server within your walls.”

Whichever option you choose, Abaca’s Kasje recommends giving off-site computing a try. “You can step into this very easily,” he says. “And you should be able to figure out very quickly whether it’s something that can benefit your business.”

Time to Consolidate Your Data Center

Old, overgrown dinosaurs of data centers may be costing your business more than you realize. Here’s what to know if you’re considering consolidating them.

More and more small-and medium-sized businesses are thinking about consolidating their data centers, as a result of having grown haphazardly or through many mergers and acquisitions. According to a 2006 report by tech research firm IDC, 80 percent of U.S. IT organizations are consolidating and in 2009 global spending on IT consolidation should hit $25 billion.

“Most of these things aren’t planned and then executives wonder how in the world they’ve grown to the number of servers they’ve got,” says Cal Braunstein, chairman and CEO of research at the Robert Frances Group, a Westport, Conn. IT consulting firm. “They need to add another application, and somehow before they know it, each of these applications are on different servers.”

And, oftentimes those different servers can be in different rooms, on different floors, and even in different cities.

M&A activity sparks consolidation

One big driver of data center consolidation is the rash of mergers and acquisitions that leave the new entities with IT systems that are often incompatible, sometimes burdening even forward-looking companies with outdated systems from a company being acquired. “CIOs are telling their CEOs, ‘Could you please buy a company with the same IT platform and infrastructure?’” says James F. O’Grady, the director of technology value solution for Hewlett-Packard Financial Services.

Why consolidate when it’s an expensive undertaking? Let’s start with those systems that are the product of mergers and acquisitions. All the little band-aid fixes to make these systems work together may be costing your company money — not to mention resources — that could be better spent elsewhere.

Even without mergers, small and medium-sized businesses tend to be sitting on a lot of older servers being kept around in order to save money on costs of new equipment. However, since many of these machines have poor utilization rates, they aren’t necessarily the best use of money. Braunstein estimates various utilization rates of different systems as follows: mainframes (75-90 percent), Unix (10-20 percent although some achieve up to 60 percent), and Windows-Intel systems (5-12 percent).

High maintenance and licensing fees

On top of having all this old equipment around, there are high maintenance costs and licensing fees, not to mention the issues of power and cooling for all your machines. “Two years ago no one cared about power and cooling,” says Braunstein. But now that energy costs have skyrocketed, businesses are starting to be more aware. Costs for power and cooling could run 40 percent of your run rate for operational components for your data center. Consolidation can mean lower power output, says HP’s O’Grady. If you have five data centers all over the country and you really only need three, not only will consolidation save on power costs but will also save on labor costs.

Those are big numbers that could be made smaller through consolidation. On average, says Braunstein, hardware costs tend to be 15 percent of overall costs.

What it means to consolidate

Consolidation can mean different things to different businesses. For some, it’s reducing the number of data location center locations and moving equipment to places that have lower operating costs, according a March 2007 report by HP, titled “Data center consolidation: Financing options address more than just cost.” Two spaces in midtown Manhattan dedicated to holding IT are more expensive to maintain, than say, combining them both into a new one in northern New Jersey. With telecommunications advances, it’s more feasible to locate the data centers away from your office.

Another approach is to consolidate at the current site by putting in a converged voice-and-data network. Or you can save space by installing racks. With a vertical rack, instead of buying servers, you buy components that altogether look a little like an entertainment system. Blade servers work on the same concept as a rack but are even more condensed. A blade comes in a smaller box, so it slides in vertically. You can get a number of these going across a couple of rows, giving you a tremendous amount of capacity in a small space.

And, then there’s the virtual approach. Companies can virtualize their servers by running many systems in a single box. Not only can that save space but it can also up performance; instead of running at about 10 percent utilization, it can be at least 40 percent.

Paying for it

No matter how you undertake it, consolidating your data center is going to cost money. According to HP, often you’ll have to keep the old data center running as you’re setting up your new one. Or, you can set up a temporary facility — using the same type of old equipment — as you’re taking apart the old center and setting up the new one. So, you could potentially have up to three data centers running at the same time before you get everything sorted out.

Companies, like HP, and IBM, and to lesser extent, Sun, who are all in the data center consolidation business provide financing options, including leasing, short-term equipment rental, and help with the recovering of money from asset sales. They also work with the customer to apply some of the costs to covering the purchasing of new equipment.

Another approach, says Braunstein, that may make sense, is putting the new data center inside one of your current spaces. “You could consolidate it piecemeal so you don’t have to go beyond the bounds of existing data center,” he says. “It takes longer this way, however, it’s a good approach because you get to see what works as you go along.”