VB Expressions
Consulting – Computer Systems and Networks
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VB ExpressionsConsulting – Computer Systems and Networks
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Data Security Is Crucial for Your Business – And LifestyleIf you use a computer in your business, you are generating data that is unique to your needs and would be expensive to replace. Whether it is financial transactions, sales proposals, business analysis, CAD drawings, engineering calculations, GIS databases, photographs, tax records, form letters, customer lists, advertising graphics and copy, mailing lists/labels or emails, you need your data – NOW! – for your business to thrive. Even if data is recoverable at an affordable price, the loss of productivity while the data is inaccessible can put quite a dent in your success. Small businesses that suffer regular losses of data generally DON’T thrive; in fact many do not SURVIVE. If you use a computer in your home, in addition to the types of data above, you may keep family memories in the form of digital pictures, tax returns, personal email or genealogy data; or entertainment in the form of down-loaded music and video; on your computers. Losing this data can be depressing when you can’t even pay to get it back. What to Be Concerned About … So, how do these losses happen? The most common source of loss is – user errors! I’m sure that everyone who has used a computer has accidentally lost work; either part of a document was erased by a keystroke error, or an entire file was deleted by accident, or the changes you made – on purpose – were negative rather than positive ones! Then there are minor or major program “glitches” – the application or computer may freeze up and the data you were working on when it happened is no longer usable. (Keeping up with security and application patches help minimize these events!) Or sometimes third-party application providers will “fix” a problem that someone else had, update you and then leave you with data that no longer works. Sometimes, the “glitches” can be hardware. Failing memory chips, motherboards or (especially) hard drives can destroy your data quickly or, maybe worse, slowly, so you don’t even notice until major damage is done. Most small business folks and home users have ALL their email on their local hard drive in a hidden folder that never gets backed up, because folks don’t even know where it is! If the hard drive fails, or the email store gets corrupted due to a hard disk flaw, there’s no getting your mail back. Some folks still store data on floppy disks: these “office supplies” are notoriously unreliable, should only be considered for short-term storage and may only work on the original computer they were written on. Then there are disasters, man-made or otherwise. These can be as “simple” as theft of the computer and its peripherals; or an electrical system that gets hit by lightning and destroys the devices plugged into a circuit; to a fire that destroys all the contents of a building; or the sprinkler system that PREVENTS the fire ends up soaking your PCs. Or, a disgruntled employee may delete your data on their way out the door … And unfortunately there is even the possibility that an unsecured PC or faulty security software could allow “malware” to destroy data in your facility. It could be that the most timely/economical way to recover from a security flaw is total isolation and re-formatting of a PC. It could happen that one infected computer will damage data on another. These circumstances may result from a now all-too-common “Zero-Day Attack,” where a previously unknown application or operating system flaw is exploited with your business as the target. Laptops, as we have seen in the news, are a growing area of concern. We are encouraged to use them everywhere, and carry sensitive data. It's obvious that they are more subject to losses through theft and physical damage, but also less obviously, due to security flaws during operation on relatively slow connections outside of firewalled networks and away from system management tools, with users typically given full rights to modify the computer settings. Risk Management … All decisions relating to your information technology infrastructure should be considered as “risk management” rather than “risk elimination.” No affordable, practical solution is 100% secure. Yet it is 100% certain that ONE of the concerns – user error – discussed above will affect your business. The appropriate response to the concerns will depend on your number of employees, their skills, the hardware quality of your PCs, your updates strategy, your investment in security measures, the amount of data you have to protect and your tolerance for risk. If you are in an industry where regulations REQUIRE you to maintain data, or if your data will have LEGAL implications, your risk from lost data is very high. First, let us consider an alternative to implementing data security measures onsite: some vertical applications are available that allow a business to do all its business on-line. Instead of generating and storing your data locally, your application service provider becomes responsible for maintaining and delivering your records, with data backup of their choice, with server redundancy and their schedule for application updates. The upside is that you can concentrate on running your business at a lower initial investment; but there are downsides:
If you want to examine the pluses and minuses of an on-line service subscription, VB Expressions will be glad to consult to determine the actual costs/benefit ratio. Here’s some GOOD NEWS for the “100% certain” scenario of user-error or program-error damaging vital data: if you have invested in a Microsoft Windows Server 2003® installation and Microsoft Windows XP® Professional or Microsoft Windows 2000® Professional on your workstations, you can implement automatic version control for all the documents stored on the server, for no additional out-of-pocket costs. That way, if a document you are working on becomes corrupted, you can easily open a previously saved version from a “Shadow Copy” stored on the server. Windows Vista® Business and Ultimate versions extend this type of protection to each desktop, no server required! Automatic version control can be a “life-saver” if a deadline is pressing and the current version of the data is damaged. This process is easy enough that “normal users” should be able to find and re-load the previous versions. VB Expressions can help you implement this strategy, as we have done for some of our current clientele. More good news for LAPTOP users of Microsoft technology: a laptop (or desktop) running Microsoft Windows XP® Professional can use data encryption to protect data on the hard drive, in case of physical loss. Windows Vista® Ultimate has even greater protection with its BitLocker technology, which essentially restricts use of your data to only the original PC, making the theft of just the hard drive an annoying, instead of business-threatening, event. And, with a Microsoft Windows Server 2003® server, LAPTOP users with Windows XP Professional, or Windows Vista Business or Ultimate, can synchronize files on their hard disk with a server share every time they connect to the server locally. This allows you to travel and work off-line, then have all your current work saved in a second location. This is a good start for data security indeed, all included in the cost of your licenses. In addition, Vista Business and Ultimate allow you to make a complete image of your setup and data, essentially a snapshot in time. In servers and advanced workstations, there are normally measures taken to reduce the impact of a hard drive failure. This technique is called RAID. In a RAID situation (normally) two or three hard drives are attached to a drive interface in a manner that allows the data to be replicated. Thus a single hard drive failure will not stop your work; the bad hard drive is replaced, and the RAID configuration is restored, often with very little downtime. All the servers that VB Expressions has specified have RAID arrays to keep the customers up and running. When Risks Are High ... For security concerns not covered by the above strategies, stronger data backup measures may be justified. The basic concepts are:
Actually pretty simple in concept, isn’t it? Data Backup Options Tape Backup The “classic” small business backup strategy is using a tape backup system and multiple tapes. Three to five years ago, this was the proven, reliable and most scalable technology available. The technology originated in enterprise operations and was considered the state-of-the-art for small business, too. It was offered widely by IT providers (including VB Expressions.) For a tape backup strategy to be a success:
This strategy is difficult to perform flawlessly without a dedicated server staff. Most of my customers have experienced problems when implementing tape-based backup solutions. There are too many points of failure: staff availability to remove the tapes off-site, familiarity with hardware, (often cryptic) software and company policy, mechanical reliability of equipment, power reliability, tape wear, etc. In addition appropriate backup hardware and software costs are considerable. Another drawback: data restoration is slow, especially if several tapes are involved, increasing the cost of recovering from failures. While data volumes have grown, the time available for backup and restore operations has not. At this time, in VB Expressions’ opinion, tape backup is relevant only to large installations where well-trained personnel are available to learn and monitor the process. There is a practical limit of about 40 gigabytes to all but the fastest and most expensive tape backup solutions. External Hard Drives A popular electronics store item these days is a hard drive in a paper-back book-size case that connects to a PC (or server) via a USB or Firewire connector, or sometimes through an Ethernet connection, wired or wireless. These devices seem attractive for backup purchases. However, because they are not connected to the PC bus directly, as an internal hard drive is, they have performance issues that can sometimes be hard to diagnose. While these devices offer the opportunity to create a second copy of the data on a relatively inexpensive platform, VB Expressions' experience has been that large-scale business backups are hard to complete in a efficient manner, and the devices are electromechanically unreliable. If one does follow this route, the same disaster-scenario problems exist as long as the devices are attached locally: in fact, the data can be stolen or damaged much more easily than a hard drive inside a computer. For LAPTOP users, this strategy may make sense. If they do not have access to a server to synchronize their data, a second copy on an external hard drive somewhere away from the laptop can be valuable in case of loss. Flash Drive Backup Today’s equivalent of the “floppy drive’ is the flash drive. These are small devices about the size of a pocket knife. Capacities are growing, and units with 512 megabytes data are today quite inexpensive (under $40), with sizes of up to 4 gigabytes available. These devices connect to a USB port on PCs with the Windows 2000 Professional/Server operating systems and later. (You will need administrative rights to install the Windows drivers the first time you connect a particular brand and model of flash drive.) To use a flash drive, you need to be familiar with Windows Explorer, and know how to find and copy files. You must monitor the capacity of the drive, and eliminate unnecessary files to make capacity for the data you want. If you have mastered those skills, a flash drive is a quick and easy backup method. They are easily removed from the site and are very durable. However, these drives are notoriously easy to misplace and essentially impossible to label. And of course only one version of a file can be in a specific directory. A low volume flash drive is not a full data backup solution. Optical Drive Backup Many PCs purchased in the last few years have included a CD writer. CD-R media is cheap (often free with rebates, or $0.05 per disk without) and durable and offers better compatibility between devices than CD-RW media or floppy drives when “closed” for writing. If your data security requirements are small (a CD-R is limited to about 640 megabytes) one can burn CDs as data backups. A DVD writer is a similar technology that ups the capacity to at least 4 gigabytes per disk. There are drawbacks: the media must still be removed from the site, labeled, secured, and organized so that the data on it can be found. CD-R and DVD-R media, which is the most compatible form, cannot be re-used. CD-RW media can be erased and re-used, but then must be carefully managed. Rewritable DVDs are common, but come in several formats, adding to the complexity of management and restoration of data. CD and DVD burning can be slow, and most users have experienced the frustration of burn process failures, where a disk is not readable after the process is completed. There are also limitations in file names that can cause the optical media to differ from the versions on the hard disk. CD burning software is also primitive compared to tape backup software, making the selection of data tedious, and disrupting the file structure on the media compared to the disk. For personal or "lifestyle" data, optical drives are nearly perfect. (For instance, I like to burn a CD of my digital pictures BEFORE I erase them from camera memory. I check the CD, then copy the files to my hard drive for manipulation. This way you always have an original to start from in case something goes wrong in the editing process.) Even the most hardened criminal is unlikely to burden himself with burned CDs, while external hard drives and PCs are irresistible. Disk Cartridge Backup In the last year, an attractive alternative to tape backup has been offered. Several vendors now offer proprietary ruggedized hard disk cartridges that are inserted into a matching disk drive, very similar to a tape drive. Disk drives are much faster for backup and restore operations than tape, and offer much higher capacity. Economies of scale have driven down the price of hard drive manufacturing so quickly that the drives and disk cartridges are priced similarly or less than tape solutions of the same capacity. However, some problems remain: the cartridges must be taken off-site, labeled and rotated correctly. And, while the warranties for the drives and cartridges are good, there would seem to be more potential mechanical problems in a hard drive solution than in a tape solution. However, if your business has large amounts of data (more than 15 gigabytes) that must be backed up over night, disk drive backups are very practical and affordable solution. Internet Backup For small to medium volume data backups, there is now a superior strategy: backup over a fast Internet connection. This differs from using a vertical application service provider in that any and all data produced in a business can be secured. There is no lock-in to one provider, and there is a tremendous amount of competition in service pricing. Some consumer-oriented vendors offer backups of small volumes of data for free. (This might be most appropriate for personal life-style backups.) The better vendors use encrypted data transfers, incremental backups and secure, environmentally-protected redundant data centers to protect your data assets. Some folks worry about the security of Internet backup. If the data is encrypted, and only incremental data is being sent on a regular basis, AND you use a strong, secret password for your user logon to the vendor, this is probably a more secure backup than any unencrypted copying of data to a tape, CD, or hard drive can be. To reconstruct the data, one needs two passwords: logon and encryption, plus the vendor's client software. And, after the original data set is sent, if the incremental data was somehow intercepted traveling across the Internet, it would be useless without the original base data. This solution relieves most of the problems with tape backup: after the first upload of data, which is typically very slow, the subsequent backups send only changed data and are quite fast; there is no need to label, organize and transport media; the disk structure is mirrored exactly on the media; the restore operations are fast and available from anywhere there is an Internet connection. Many of these vendors have multiple versions of your data available to restore, so if an error was made on Monday, for example, the previous Friday's data can be retrieved on the following Thursday for reuse and rework. Internet backups can be more easily monitored offsite by your staff by routing reports through email. In addition, some vendors will provide for an extra fee, an optical drive “hard copy” of a data point-in-time for financial closings, etc. Because the upload speed of most business Internet connections is limited (typically around 5% of the download speed) regular high-volume Internet backups over 5 gigabytes will consume the connection during business hours. If there is little other Internet activity, this may be acceptable. However, VB Expressions generally would not recommend Internet backup options if the size exceeds 15 gigabytes. Up to 15 gigabytes costs about $30 per month from several vendors, or $1 per day. Not too bad if you consider the headaches the loss of critical business data would cause! (Theoretically one can accomplish this feat in-house between two business locations with servers running Windows Server 2003 R2 and its new changes-only replication in a distributed file system. However that solution is beyond the scope of this discussion.) Summary Data security is not a luxury for small business, it is a necessity. Choosing the right option for your level of risk tolerance is not simple. One must decide what data needs to be backed up, how often and with what personnel resources, and balance that against hardware, software and service costs. VB Expressions has the experience to help you make an appropriate choice. Call us! |
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