Our Technology Consultancy specializes in Small & Medium Business and Healthcare I.T.. Our clients range from small 5 person 1 doctor Medical Offices to organizations in the Construction and Engineering industry with hundreds of employees and numerous location. Our staff is the I.T. Department for these organizations.
I've been in I.T. for over 21 years and have dealt with every type of issue you can imagine, from problems that were siting between the chair and keyboard to network and server issues disrupting the work of hundreds of staff.
Here I’d like to discuss Backup and Disaster Recovery (BDR). If your organization’s data is important to you, you need to have a BDR Plan in place to protect it because “Stuff” happens! Plus, there are regulatory requirements (like HIPAA) to have your data backed up and always available for many industries.
There are many people around the world making a ton of money helping to make that “Stuff” happen to your data! For example, ever hear of Cryptolocker or Cryptowall, the Malware programs that encrypt your data and then demand hundreds or thousands of dollars in Bitcoin to give you access? When you hear about a company having to pay a ransom, that means they didn't have a good backup strategy! I'm here to say, you don't want to be that organization!
Let’s start by listing some of the threats (Stuff) you may want to protect against. (In no particular order)
- Malicious internal or external actor; (And I don't mean a bad documentary film actor being sent to your business by Michael Moore)
- A car running into your server room (Its Vegas, and I've had multiple clients with Vehicles inside their walls accidentally)
- Theft
- Fire
- Flood from rain or your sprinkler system!
- Accidental Deletion
- Hardware Failure
- Or terrorism (Would have been a bit far-fetched 16 years ago, but now, unfortunately not so far-fetched anymore!)
- Lots of other possibilities, just use your imagination!
These threats have different levels of impact; in some cases, just your data is damaged or lost, your server fails or worst case, your whole facility is lost. You need to have the ability to get back to work in any of these scenarios!
Are you backing up your server to itself or to tape? If so, you don’t have much of a backup! If you are using an offsite file backup application like Carbonite, you can restore individual files in a timely manner, but not your large database or whole server and you may not able to recover in time to prevent revenue loss or reputation damage!
Based upon experience over many years I have some recommendations that I know do work and have saved my clients from extended downtime and complete disaster! A comprehensive backup solution must have three components; local backup, offsite backup and fast virtualization and recovery.
First, all critical servers must be backed up locally to a Backup Server (best solution), or an external Disk, NAS or a SAN and have the ability for quick file restore and the ability to virtualize failed servers to get you back up and running on temporary hardware quickly to avoid prolonged down time. A backup server is best, because it allows for the quickest recovery and best temporary performance while you fix or replace failed hardware. Also, backing up every 15 to 90 minutes throughout the work day to keep from losing to much data is much better than a nightly backup as was the traditional method in previous decades.
The second component of a good backup solution is sending your data offsite either to a secondary branch office location or to a cloud backup provider. If your data is lost due to fire, theft or other disaster, having a copy of your backup offsite is critical to getting back up and running as opposed to shutting your doors! You can send your data offsite to another branch office if you are a multi-location organization, just have a plan in place to get the data back quickly if you need it.
The best solution is automatically sending a copy of your local backup to a cloud provider that also provides the ability to virtually boot your backed up servers in the cloud in the case of a facility loss! The costs for such solutions were very high in the past, but due to significant reductions in storage costs, you can have it all for less than $200 per server per month.
What does it cost your organization in staff time, revenue loss and customer dissatisfaction when your systems are down? What can the regulatory fines be in the case of the loss of customer data? Why take the chance? Have the discussion with your I.T. Manager about your organization’s BDR plan and if you need help, please give our offices a call at 702-553-3200 or email support@LVMedIT.com.
By:
Leo Bletnitsky, President
LBA Networking, Inc. dba Las Vegas Med I.T.
the Vegas Business & Healthcare I.T. Guys
