Avoiding Big Risks For Midsize Businesses

Disaster recovery (DR) is vital. At the very worst, its absence can shut a business down. At the very least, companies increasingly need it to comply with government regulations in terms of data accountability and security. These mandatory impositions are particularly onerous for the midsized business—the company with perhaps as few as three hundred employees and certainly no more than one thousand. These are usually businesses on the up and up. Rapid growth and success often means that their administrative and management practices lag behind their expansion curve. In other words, it is very easy for a midsized company to find itself (albeit unwittingly) trading illegally. Its officers may not fully understand the requirements of Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) or HIPAA or Gramm- Leach-Bliley or Check 21 or any of the dozens of other pieces of regulation that may apply to their particular area of business. However, one thing is certain; whatever nuances may apply to specific verticals (e.g., SOX, HIPAA), each and every one of them demands that data be protected and retrievable in case of failure.

And yet according to Enterprise Strategy Group over 60% of midsized business do not have a DR plan and are inconsistent at best at making backups. In general, they have no contingency plans for restoring critical services/operations, no secure offsite data storage, and certainly no on-demand, exact copy, data retrieval.

So why is this? Who in their right mind wouldn't want to keep a secure, up-to-the-minute copy of business-critical data (never mind what the regulators want!) The answer is one word: complexity. Until now it has just been too difficult, especially for the midsized organization. Data storage infrastructures have always been somewhat volatile, and traditionally, the solution has simply been to have multiple copies of everything—and that includes hardware, software, documentation, indeed entire data centers. This catch-all approach is simply too expensive to be considered by the midsized businesses, and they have watched their data expand with a touching faith in the reliability of disk drives and the foibles of human nature as "the IT guys" have struggled with floppies, tapes, and any other medium that might give them a sporting chance of retrieving something—anything—in the face of a massive outage.