BusinessReport.com

In the broad spectrum of businesses in the state, Louisiana Citizens Property Insurance Corp. provides a very specialized service. But it is currently undergoing problems that any business could face—a data recovery crisis.

Citizens Insurance leadership focused on claim payment following hurricanes Katrina and Rita, which came at the expense of the company’s everyday bookkeeping. Auditors were unable to compile financial statements for the past two years or complete an audit when it was discovered that data for the company was overwritten on the backup system every two weeks.

The bulk of the data should be recovered within a few months, allowing the company to overcome what could have been an extremely challenging obstacle. But Citizens’ problems serve as a reminder to businesses of the importance of having a data backup system in place to secure critical records.

Making a plan

The first step to successful data backup is having a comprehensive plan to handle the system.

Companies make one common mistake by turning over data backup and disaster recovery duties to one employee, says Turn Key Solutions COO John Overton. The people are the most underused component of data security.

“The cheapest part of the plan is the people,” Overton says, “making sure everybody has buy in, making sure everybody is involved in the disaster planning.”

Then there is implementation of the plan itself.

Companies that have not outsourced the majority of these duties should set and maintain a schedule, including testing of the backup system and tasking someone with delivering the tapes to another location. “You don’t want the newest guy on the team to be the one dropping the tapes offsite,” Overton says.

If people are the most underused part of the planning process, checking the integrity of the system can prove to be the biggest oversight. Greg Derbes, owner of Nerdworks Computing, recommends running a test recovery at least monthly to make sure your backup is actually backing up.

“We see it constantly. People think their backups are working, and they’re not,” Derbes says. “What happens is they have a disaster—a hard drive fails—they go to recover the stuff, and they find out they weren’t backing up what they thought they were backing up.”

Choosing the system

For smaller operations, data backup can mean doing as little as installing backups to the programs on their computers. As inexpensive as a cheeseburger, information such as the financial books for the business can be burned onto CD.

The next step up is low-end tape drives and external hard drives, where data can be copied and taken offsite. Tapes are particularly prone to going bad from wear and tear and should be monitored to make sure they are working. Some tapes also will not be considered certifiable backups for businesses such as those in health care, which have to meet certain requirements when it comes to backing up data.

For businesses that use tape drives, it is important not only to have the drives offsite, but to have a compatible computer offsite as well. Tape drives come in a variety of sizes, formats and software, and finding a compatible machine if one is not on hand could prove problematic in an emergency.

Another option, backing up data through the Internet, was once hampered by high prices and speed issues. “That’s getting to be a better and better solution,” Derbes says.

With both speed and price becoming more attractive, companies are opting to send their data offsite through the Internet, often after hours, when employees aren’t taking up bandwidth. This method also reduces the risk of corruption, since disc storage is not prone to the same physical breakdowns as tape.

When choosing a backup system, there are a couple of important issues.

The first is to have an offsite storage location. Keeping your backup tape in an onsite safe does little good in the event of a fire (even heat exposure in a fireproof safe can cause problems).

The other necessity is to introduce as much redundancy as possible while maintaining practicality and affordability. “Is there overkill on backup? Yes,” Overton says. “But I haven’t seen it yet.”

Determining price security

There are no hard and fast rules to what businesses should spend in implementing and maintaining data backup systems.

Brian D. Vandegrift, sales manager for Network Technology Group says businesses of all sizes face the same question. “What data do I have critical to my business,” he says. “If the data’s critical, you have to back it up.”

The cost of data security ranges from quite affordable to prohibitively expensive. The cost of outsourcing also varies, with service contracts running anywhere from $10 a month to thousands of dollars a year, depending on the amount of data being stored. Vandegrift suggests that data backup involve as little involvement with people as possible, eliminating much of the element of human error.

For the businesses looking to be extra careful, measures like redundant data connections and satellite Internet help quickly drive up the price. “They aren’t cheap,” Overton says. “But in the perspective of what it would cost if you were unable to do those things [such as connecting to customer databases] it would quickly justify those costs.”

Therein lies the difficulty of budgeting for data security. “It’s hard to get a real return on investment,” Vandegrift says. “If you’ve done it properly, you never know what that expense would have been to have that problem.”