smallbusiness.co.uk: Helping your business think big

Recent events have put the issue of business continuity and disaster recovery at the forefront of many business-owners' minds. All businesses need to prepare for the worst, be it the total loss of their premises, computer failure or simple human error; losing the information stored on systems can be catastrophic.

Mike Osborne, operations director of ICM Computer Group, believes that a shift is occurring away from magnetic media such as tapes towards asynchronous models of data back-up as the latter become more affordable. The vulnerability of tapes was highlighted last month as the retail finance division of Citigroup admitted to misplacing tapes containing information on four million customers.

Under the asynchronous system, changes are backed up periodically, generally at the end of the day, and then sent, via the unused broadband line after work has finished for the day, to an off-site location.

'Of course, with this system, some information is likely to be lost if a recovery has to be made,' warns Osborne. 'How much depends on how frequently the back-up occurs and the time of the disaster.' For example, if the back-up takes place once a day at 9pm, but the office systems are lost at 7pm then no changes from that day will be saved.

With tapes, even assuming they have been stored off-site (Osborne believes a significant number of businesses store tapes in the same premises as their main servers) and are therefore safe from a building disaster like a fire, it takes 24 to 48 hours to retrieve all the data.

When considering back-up procedures, Osborne suggests looking at the 'critical data. Do you need everything backed up or perhaps just one application; email, for example? This has a major bearing on the costs involved.'

At between Ł10,000 and Ł50,000 for a full back-up, asynchronous systems don't come cheap, but could potentially save your business should your information be lost. Of course, a cheaper option would be to back up only those applications containing information vital to the business.

Osborne strongly advises regular 'test' retrievals to ensure that the back-up is working correctly. 'It would be a real disaster if the worst happened and only then did you discover you hadn't actually backed anything up after all.'

(15/7/05)

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