Mayfield Enterprise Solutions

Many risks are unavoidable, but companies operating without a business continuity plan to protect your critical data are extremely vulnerable to unexpected downtime and data loss.

Studies show that 93% of businesses that lost their computer network for 10 days or more due to a disaster filed for bankruptcy within one year of the disaster, and 50% of businesses that found themselves without a way to restore or reconstruct their data for this same time period, filed for bankruptcy immediately.

But even if a company doesn't experience this level of catastrophe, it can still end up losing a considerable amount of productive work and man hours due to a system crash, virus, power outage, or even human error. Not to mention the money it will take to restore the data system.

All businesses face a certain degree of risk, but savvy business owners and managers are looking to eliminate unnecessary risks as well as uncertainty. Business continuity solutions provide business owners and managers with a safety net that enables their organizations to continue to operate. Regardless of the cause of the business interruption, a business continuity plan provides businesses with the assurance that they need to stay competitive in today's markets.

The data backup method for most companies has been to backup vital information on a data tape and let an employee such as an IT manager take it home for safe keeping. It's a simple and cheap plan. But you get exactly what you pay for.

The wrong backup media can cause more problems than they solve. Companies have been dealing with inadequate and incompatible media for decades.

Tape backup required a significant investment. Tape hardware and backup software were expensive, as is the labor required to set up and maintain them. Tape was physically delicate and easily compromised by environmental factors such as heat, humidity and magnetic interference, and tape cartridges must be replaced every 6 to 12 months.

Tape sensitivity contributed to high failure rates; with analysts estimating that 40 percent of tape restores fail. Tapes were subject to loss or theft, and were sometimes offsite were unavailable to the IT people at the recovery site. Tape was seldom encrypted, compounding the destructive impact of tape theft. Very few people encrypted backup tapes

The backup process was inconvenient. Tape backup involved downtime, known as 'backup windows', since the system being backed up cannot be used during the process. The backup and restore process is inconsistent. The odds were high that neither the tape backup nor the restore would work at the critical moment. Tape backup was unable to achieve an acceptable recovery point objective (RPO) - the point in time to which system data can be recovered should disaster strike. Periodic tape backup guaranteed hours of lost data in the event of a disaster. Traditional tape-based backup solutions fell behind and were no longer meeting backup/restore requirements.

Organizations have performed data backups to tape and carried a copy of these tapes off-site. However, installed disk capacity has grown faster than tape performance. There was a time when tape-based backup was widely believed to be the only feasible backup solution for small to medium businesses, but when evaluated on such criteria as total cost of ownership, scalability, data security, automation, reliability, ease of data restoration, required length of backup window, and server virtualization, it became obvious that alternate solutions needed to be used.