Firms failing to get their heads around back-up

Many businesses are still failing to implement effective back-up strategies leaving their companies ill-prepared for disaster recovery and at risk from data loss, compliance headaches and a new breed of criminal, intent on holding stolen data to ransom.

However, among those companies which are addressing the issue of back-up, many are taking increasingly cautious measures, with automated virtual back-up, remote back-up of laptops and even offshoring of data among the fastest-growing trends.

One consideration in more security-conscious times is disaster recovery – how a company gets up and running again after fire, theft, power cut, natural disaster, terrorist attack or other 'act of God'.

Aydin Kurt-Elli, CEO of business ISP Lumison which offers automated remote back-up with storage at a secure data centre in Scotland, told silicon.com his customers want to know their data is held away from higher-risk areas.

"We are certainly pitching Scotland more these days as a non-tactical site. London and the M4 corridor is a more likely target than us Scots," he said.

Others are looking at destinations such as Iceland and Sweden which offer geographic distance and perceptions of security and neutrality.

Eran Farajun, executive vice-president of back-up company Asigra, told silicon.com: "People are starting to realise they need to get their data off site." He said interest in Iceland as a "data haven" is growing rapidly. The island has excellent fibre connectivity, sitting as a hub for transatlantic cables and offers political stability and strong data protection laws.

As well as geographical security, human error also becomes a factor with traditional tape back-ups – everything from the tapes being kept on-site, beside the device they're backing up to tapes getting lost.

Most recently there was scandal at Bank of America, with the bank admitting it had lost more than one million customer account details when back-up tapes went missing in transit.

Such a blunder suggests putting more distance between data and human error, if nothing else, is an essential improvement called for with back-up strategies.

Other apocryphal tales over the years include an oil drilling firm losing valuable data when a tape was dropped from a helicopter into the North Sea on its way to onshore storage.

Despite this, figures from Gartner reveal that 80 per cent of companies still back-up on a local device. Lumison's Kurt-Elli agreed that virtual back-up still needs a push to acquire mainstream presence and displace tape.

James Governor, analyst at Red Monk, told silicon.com tape is far from dead but like many technologies the issue boils down to how they are used.

"Tape is a sensible element of any disaster recovery. Bank of America wasn't a problem of tapes. It was a management failure. Tape works very well, as long as it is managed. Why not use a network to transport the data from one place to another, then store on tape at both ends?"

According to a Department of Trade and Industry report last year, one-third of all UK businesses and two-thirds of large businesses had a security incident that involved loss of data. Two-thirds of respondents reported taking more than a day taken to recover from their worst systems failure.

Red Monk's Governor added: "Organisations need to do a better job of analysing their data and working out what to store and where as part of an overall IT governance strategy, underpinning a wide range of business initiatives including compliance."

One of the greatest holes in corporate infrastructure is bored by the move to greater mobility.

Laptops take off-site have long been identified as a security risk but they can also pose a business risk if they are not backed-up.

Asigra's Farajun claims laptops are even becoming a 'kidnap' target with thieves aware they may well be able to ransom the data on the laptop.

"There are thieves out there who are now aware that the value of the data on that laptop may be worth far more money than they would get for the laptop," he said.

As such criminals are targeting laptops and then offering to sell them back to the victim at extortionate rates. The gamble they are making is that the laptop contains valuable data which hasn't been backed up in a while and that the company would rather pay-up than risk adverse publicity.

Farajun said a lack of regular presence in the office is no longer an excuse for failing to back-up data.

With remote back-up services available, from companies such as Asigra, "people can back-up their data in Starbucks if they want".