Backup Solutions - SOHO to Enterprise
Regardless of the size of your operation, your goal of business continuity is no different from a Fortune 500 company. Even if you are a small office / home office (SOHO), you differ mainly in scale. But there are several critical pieces of knowledge that you must have in hand before committing your company's business information assets to a particular backup/disaster recovery plan.
What are my company's information assets? Hint: it's NOT the workstation, laptop or server upon which they happen to reside. Those are merely the EASILY and quickly replaceable containers for the information that you use every day. The same applies to the network that may be supporting your business. Replaceable within reason. Your company's information assets are the operating systems, applications and the data residing within the structure of those applications. That's what you're really trying to protect. Remember - hardware's relatively cheap and quickly replaceable. Not so the constellation of OS, applications and data that resides there.
Where does all of the info reside? If you've never given much thought to this question, now is the time to do it. If you don't know where your information resides, then you've basically lost control of your system. And you certainly can't be sure that you're backing up everything necessary. For example, if your business uses QuickBooks, how many instances of your QuickBooks data files are there? Do you keep a copy on a laptop? How do you keep the various copies in synch? It's a versioning issue, and trust me - that's probably not the only thing that exists in multiple versions within your business. Interesting how looking at one issue can expose other potential problems, isn't it?
How will you back it all up? Here's where the right backup hardware and software and a thoughtful review of procedures come into play.
When will you back it all up? Here's where a thoughtful review of policy comes into play.
With the questions of What, Where, How and When in mind, let's look at some typical solutions for different personal and business scenarios:
| Scenario | What | Where | How | When |
| Entrepreneur |
QuickBooks, documents, Spreadsheets. Outlook database. |
Single Laptop. |
Software: WinVista backup or Acronis True Image Home edition (preferred).
Hardware: Single portable USB drive (ex: WD Passport) |
|
| Home Office |
QuickBooks, documents, Spreadsheets. Outlook database. |
Single Workstation. |
Software: WinVista backup or Acronis True Image Home edition (preferred).
Hardware: High Capacity external USB drive (ex: WD MyBook 500GB)
|
|
| Small Business |
Accounting, shared documents, line-of-business application and data. Outlook databases for each workstation. Router configuration file. |
3-8 workstations. 1 server. 1 router/firewall. |
Software: Acronis True image home edition for workstations, Acronis True Image Server Edition.
Hardware: Network Attached Storage device drive (ex: NETGEAR 1000GB RAID)
Managed Service: Remote Data Backups |
|
| Medium-sized Business |
Accounting, shared documents, line-of-business application and data. Outlook databases for each workstation. Router and switch configuration files. |
5-15 workstations. 2 or more servers. Router/firewall. Smart switch |
Software: Acronis True image home edition for workstations, Acronis True Image Server Edition.
Hardware: High capacity Storage Server (>2TB)
Managed Service: Remote Data Backups |
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NOTE: The role of clearly defined policies and procedures becomes increasingly important as the stakes go up.
Failure to implement a clearly defined and tested backup and disaster recovery strategy for your personal data is foolhardy; failure to do so for your business is suicidal.
StarLAN Consulting Services offers a variety of automated and reliable backup and restoration systems that will scale to fit your business continuity needs. We also offer consulting services aimed specifically at producing a practical and effective disaster recovery plan. Please contact us for a free assessment of your needs. |
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