The Business Impact of Data Loss

Backing up an organization’s data is quite possibly one of the most important sets of all regular and sporadic computer, system and network administrative and maintenance processes that businesses of all sizes need to address.

Backup Technologies

The actual technologies available to do this have increased dramatically in sophistication, number, type, media, methodology, choice and the degree of inherent automation supported. User “friendly” aspects, security, cost effectiveness and quality of services must as always be taken into consideration.

Other important decisions that must be arrived at include: customization/customizability, simplicity, choice of media, robustness, scalability, data availability, data accessibility, data integrity, data confidentiality, storage, rotation parameters, recovery and recovery procedures.

Statistical Horror Stories

The reasons for developing situation-specific appropriate backup strategies may be manifold but there is little doubt that in most instances the following horror story statistics highlight this need (regular backups) best.

Severe Outages 

Whenever a major outage lasts for ten days or more the organization or individual concerned will never fully recover. In fact more than 50% of this group will not be in business in five years time.

Small Business Data Loss 

Over 70% of all small businesses that experience data loss will be forced to suspend trading and close their doors permanently with twelve months of the occurrence of the data loss event.

Users 

85% of all computer users interviewed stated that they believe very strongly that their data should be backed up. Unfortunately; in the real world the reality is that only around 25% of them actually do so.

You know you are in trouble whenever you are right about something and immediately disregard your own good advice. Ideas are only ever truly wonderful after they have been put into practice.

Verification

More than 75% of all respondents indicated that it was important to verify the backup immediately it has been made in order to ensure that nothing went haywire during the backup process.

In other words verifying that you got what you intended and the manner you intended and in the appropriate format as intended. Once again the worrying statistic here is that less than 10% actually do so. This is yet another example of not heeding your own good advice.

Data Disaster Categories

There are three basic categories of disasters that can cause/initiate data loss. The business and personal impacts of all data disaster categories can be greatly reduced or even eliminated through the implementation and ongoing use and development of data backup regimes.

Natural Disasters

Natural disasters such as hurricanes/cyclones, tornados, lightning strike, floods, fire, etc are one cause of data loss that seems to be routinely left unaddressed by many data loss solutions (at least up until recently). While it is reasonably easy to find solutions for natural disasters they none-the-less remain beyond our direct control.

Mechanical Failure

Data loss due to mechanical failures; directly or otherwise, form one of the most commonly encountered causes of data loss that we can exert considerable influence and increasing levels of control over.

Examples of this category of data loss causes include, hard drive failures, crashes, server crashes, connectivity issues, Power Supply Unit (PSU) failures etc. The last of these; the PSU failure scenarios being by far the most prevalent.

Human Error Disasters

Human error is another cause of data loss that can also be controlled to some extent with backups forming the most reliable of possible solutions. Accidental data erasure and/or corruption being very common. Yet again preventative backup regime implementations can for the large part nullify this category of issues.

However; as we have seen in the above statistics, very few users will actually perform a backup procedure. This means that some form of automation needs to be included in any backup solutions that you may consider to implement.

Malicious Human Instigated Disasters

Not too hard to guess the types of events and scenarios that are included in this category of data loss disaster scenarios. Malware for example has over the years caused considerable damage and loss of functionality for many sites.

Some of the more notorious species actually had as part of their payload a hard drive formatting capability and could thereby erasing the entire contents of your hard drive. Very high impact threat with ever growing numbers of varieties all with varying degrees of pathological behavior.

Backup Media

Today we have quite a few data backup media options including:

Tape Backup

Tape backups are probably the most reliable and are ideally suited to be the choice of preference whenever large amounts of data (100 GB+) require frequent backup and online solutions do not as yet support since they were never designed to do so.

Online Backup

Can be a very cost-effective solution for the smaller organization and individuals. There are also a number of security concerns that one should always enquire about. The most pressing of these concerns are the measures that your online storage services use to backup themselves.

The types of security initiatives that they have implemented or will be implementing also merit closer investigation and research. Also enquire about the future and the approach that your online storage/backup service has planned. Bandwidth requirement issues may preclude online backup, storage and restore as a viable backup solution for many smaller enterprises.

Flash Drive Backup

For larger data sets (1 GB+) backups flash/thumb drives are not as yet a reliable cost-effective solution.

Optical Disc Backup and Storage

Optical storage media are becoming ever more the preferred solution for individuals and small business alike. Care does need to be taken with the storage of optical discs. The advent of the DVD format and blue ray technologies is fueling the adoption of optical storage media for backups.

Hard Drive Backups

Both internal and external hard drives are used to backup to. Just remember that hard drives are mechanical devices and that all mechanical devices will fail. It’s just a matter of time.

RAID arrays do at least in part address the issues surrounding drive failure by backing up to more than one hard drive at a time. I will be discussing these and many other hard drive backup and storage issues in a future article.

Network Backups

This option has been around for a while now. Storage Area Networks (SANs), Network Attached Storage (NAS) and RAID Arrays all have a part to play here.

Backup Policies

For additional information including the design and implementation of backup policies check this out: Backup Policies