Time to Abandon the "Point-in-Time" Backups

In todays world, data and electronic communications are critical to small business success. If your data was to disappear, what would that do to your business? What would a series of data losses cost your business? What great ideas would be gone, never to come back?

The most common solution for many small businesses is to use tape devices, hard drives and some companies even used CD/DVD disks to back up their sales databases, accounting information, client information and any other data that is important to their business.

The issue with tape and disk-based backup systems is that they are a point-in-time backup. What does this mean? Sometime in the middle of the night, a process is started on your computer or network servers to take all of your data, emails, and system configuration and put a copy onto a tape or disk. This is great to have a copy of your data store on some removable device.

At the very least, you will at least have a backup that is 24 hours old. Is this suitable for your business? Maybe not! What happens if your server crashes and you have a data loss at 5 PM in the evening? OK, now your IT consultant has a tape from last nightgreat start. What about all the work that happened throughout the day? How about all the intellectual property that was created that day, that big sales proposal that can take your business to the next level or that important annual report that your executive assistant worked on all day?

Now you have the loss of all that intellectual property and a cost factor associated with it. Lets just look at the numbers relating to one day of data loss in a company. Your company is 25 employees and all of them work on your computer network throughout the day. To be reasonable we will say they work 6 hours on files, correspondence and other important business data. We will assume that the average rate of pay is $20.00 per hour to be on the conservative side.

In this example, your single day loss of productivity just from a salary perspective is $3,000.00 in lost wages. This number does not account for the lost Intellectual Property, revenues relating to the not getting the proposals out in time and any other expenses relating to not meeting your targets. Also this number does not account for what your IT Company will charge you to recover your data from last nights tape.

There are great solutions to protect small business today from the loss of data, time, salaries and other expenses associated with data loss. The SonicWALL Continuous Data Protection appliance is a great solution for todays small business. The CDP backup unit will take all of your corporate data and store it on a device that sits on your network and in real time backs up all of your data as changes are made. So now in the example where your server fails and you suffer a data loss, all of your sales information, accounting data, correspondence and other company data is safely stored on the backup appliance.

This is all great; however, many IT people will question the ability to take the data off-site. At least with a tape we can store that data off-site at a secure vault or other storage facility. Fair enough, however the SonicWALL CDP appliance will also back up your data off-site (after the data is backed up on the appliance) at one of their electronic storage facilities. Now you take away the human factor of someone having to handle your tape and risk losing your corporate data because of a lost or stolen tape.

For todays small business, a robust SonicWALL CDP appliance that will back up your corporate data, allow for versions of your data so you can go back and recover a particular version, and also give your employees that ability to recover their own data. No more tapes, human interaction and other potential issues relating to time. No more point in time backups and now into real time backup with versioning. The potential return on this investment is immediate. A good point in time tape device with software and tapes will cost the same as the backup appliance from SonicWALL.

As a small business owner, you need to be concerned about the loss of your critical corporate data; however you shouldnt be worried about the loss because you can know that you are properly safeguarded from any data loss. Remember, the cost of data loss is a lot more that just the cost of the data; you have salaries, potential loss of revenue and many more expenses.

Invest in the technology to safeguard your business.

Stuart Crawford is a business leader in the Calgary, Alberta small business computer consulting business. He is the Director of Business Development for Calgarys award winning small business IT service organization IT Matters. IT Matters is a SonicWALL Gold Partner and leader in SonicWALL solutions in the Calgary marketplace. He can be reached at scrawford@itmatters.ca.

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