Information Management for SMBs - Backup & Archiving Together Makes Sense

If you’re like me, you store the vast majority of your information in your email inbox. Everything from expense reports to multiple versions of PowerPoint presentations get saved and stashed in Outlook folders. Unfortunately, this can be inefficient when trying to locate and manage information. Saving everything forever and keeping it on the messaging server can bog down the email system. Likewise, storing all of this information locally or on file shares in PSTs creates a storage nightmare. And both approaches have serious repercussions when trying to meet an electronic records request as part of on-going litigation or corporate retention requirements. These challenges are pretty common, but what’s the impact within small to mid-sized organizations?

SMBs are increasingly realizing that keeping emails in Outlook is not the best strategy for storing corporate data. A combination of backup and archiving technologies provide the best strategy for managing and protecting data, while increasing data retention and recovery speeds.

Let’s cover backup first. The backup technologies that are available today offer instant backup of information and enable quick restoration of that information after corruption or loss due to a human error, system disruption, power outage, security incident, or disaster (i.e. flooding, fire, power outage). Backup is an obvious necessity for both SMB owners and IT managers – if you don’t have it, you’re eventually going to lose important data.

Archiving is a bit more of an unknown for many of our SMB customers and is often mistaken for backup. Archiving can actually offload much of the backup burden by streamlining data retention and resource management. Archiving is catching on as a necessity along with backup. According to a study by Osterman Research Inc., 63 percent of email users will use an archiving solution by the end of this year. Similarly, recent studies by the Enterprise Strategy Group suggest that email and other messaging applications store as much as 75 percent of a company’s intellectual property.

Email archiving keeps a record of business critical information in line with an organization’s own corporate governance policies. To put it simply, it makes it easy to locate and retrieve information for end-users as well as for legal purposes, if necessary. And it takes the burden off IT to support fire-drills around lost data.

Corporate information, much of which is stored in email systems, needs to be available 24x7. Backup and archiving technologies used together can help SMBs meet stringent business requirements, protect employee and corporate data Here are a couple of tips for SMBs to consider.

Archiving:
1. Get retention policies in place and keep it simple. Define and archive information in classes appropriate to the value of information. Work with your business leaders to establish good policies.
2. Delete information. Don’t save everything forever as over-retention is a major problem. Create policies to selectively archive business critical information and delete what you don’t need.
3. Ensure the data is secure throughout the backup and archiving process. Information should be transferred across the network securely, while protection should be extended to both physical and electronic access to the data sources.
4. Backup and archiving require a best of breed approach. Look for ways to integrate archiving within the backup strategy. Archives need to be protected and ensuring you can backup and recover the archive with ease is essential. It is important that the process is simple and reliable.

Backup:
1. Identify those applications that are mission critical to your company.
2. Ensure your company utilizes a backup solution that covers multiple storage environments like SAN and NAS.
3. Use a blended approach with disk and tape appropriately in a backup environment. Leverage disk’s advantages (random access) and tape’s advantages (very low cost storage) together to achieve optimal performance at low cost while improving overall recovery reliability.
Incorporate solutions that leverage backup-to-disk to minimize the need for end user involvement and tape handling.
4. Leverage new technologies that not only incorporate data protection benefits but allow their use with minimal changes to existing processes.
5. Ensure that backup management consoles are at a minimum password-protected.
6. Test your backups regularly to make sure they are working properly for disaster recovery purposes