One Step Ahead

AFTER RECENT disasters like Hurricane Katrina, the Northeast Blackout and the September 11th terrorist attacks, most businesses owners are aware that a disaster could happen. Still, not all businesses have taken action to prevent, prepare for and recover from one.

Most believe it never will happen to them and are willing to accept the risk, often without analyzing what that means. Large disasters may not happen to you, but small disasters can and do happen somewhere, every day.

Webster’s defines disaster as “a calamitous event, especially one occurring suddenly and causing great loss of life, damage or hardship.” A business disaster could also be described as an event where the cost of the damage done exceeds the cost of prevention and results in a loss to the business that may render the business unable to continue.

The printing industry has gone through a major evolution over the past few decades with the advent of digital printing and electronic document management. This evolution continues as personalized or customized printing becomes an important part of normal life for consumers and businesses alike, putting greater demands on printers to deliver these products at competitive prices in shorter time windows.

Like most businesses, printers are dependent on data availability. With this increasing dependence on data, in-plant operations must be prepared for disasters that may leave their facilities unavailable but their data available. The survival of their business—and those of their parent organizations—may depend upon it.

No Disaster Recovery without Data Recovery

The impact of a disaster involving your data touches your business, your customers and your suppliers. When you can’t print because of a data problem the consequences could range from not being able to print your customer’s jobs to being unable to print your bills, resulting in lost job income or even loss of business.

The most likely source of business interruption is power failure (72 percent). It could be a localized blackout that damages your data or a regional blackout that affects millions. Other types of interruptions have a role too: data can become interrupted by hardware failure (52 percent), telecommunications failures (46 percent), software problems (43 percent) and natural disasters (37 percent).

In fact, it is more likely that you’ll experience a data interruption due to human error and mischief (34 percent) than to fire and explosion (14 percent). The human error can be something as innocent as someone deleting a critical file by accident or opening an e-mail that unleashes a virus. It can and will happen.

Don’t Panic...Prepare

There are numerous steps you can take to minimize the impact of a data interruption. Probably the most simple is to maintain an up-to-date backup of your mission critical data so you can restore it quickly and easily. This is step one of business continuity and disaster recovery. Simply put, you cannot continue operations or recover from a disaster without your data.

In the past, many companies relied on backing up their data to tape, which they also kept at their facility. So a problem that left the facility unavailable also left the data unavailable. DR and BC professionals recommend that companies keep backups in a safe place off site. Recently, with regional disasters such as Hurricane Katrina that impacted a large swath of the South, companies that kept their tapes off site, but within the region, lost their backups.

DR advisors recommend storing off-site backups at least 40 miles away; many recommend at least 200 miles away. Obviously, if your data is stored on tapes and kept 200 miles away, restoring it would be neither quick nor easy. So, obviously, tapes are not the answer. Tapes degrade with significant temperature variations (extreme heat or cold) as well as humidity. They also degrade over time. So tapes have fallen out of favor as a storage medium.

Today’s new medium of choice is spinning disks. They are often less expensive than tape and are significantly more reliable. (Think iPod vs. 8-track tape.) Managed service providers (MSPs) have developed online electronic backup services that capture the data locally, compress and encrypt it and transmit it within seconds to offsite electronic data vaults where it is kept “live” and available from any Internet connection in the world, at any time of the day or night. DR professionals recommend that, for full disaster recovery capabilities, there should be two backups in geographically separated areas to add an extra layer of data protection and security, and some MSPs have developed this service at very affordable price points.

Another important step toward business continuity and DR is to make sure that the backup is set to happen at strategically important time intervals that make sense to your business and printing schedules. Your last backup is important as well as the type of backup—a full vs. an incremental backup (one that has only changed since the last backup). If you need your backup to restore data, and your last backup was 24 or 48 hours ago, any data changes since then have been lost. Analyze your data and determine how often you need to back up to protect your data in order to protect your business.

Use an MSP or Do It Yourself?

According to Forrester Research, most companies have slow-growing or stagnant IT budgets and staffing combined with more pressures to acquire, manage and protect greater amounts of data. These business demands on IT fuel the demand for outsourcing to manage the increasing storage needs. Managed service providers are increasing the breadth and depth of their service offerings while driving down prices.

Tanner Bechtel, director of marketing and technology at ReproMAX, a large international network of independent reprographic companies with more than 350 locations, selected IPR International, of Conshohocken, Pa., to handle backup and disaster recovery for his company.

“The industry is very different from where we were 10 or 20 years ago,” says Bechtel. “It is less about printing and distribution and more about distribution and printing, where you distribute to a lot of locations and print from there.”

He decided to outsource backup and disaster recovery because “storage isn’t our discipline, and it is expensive to do on our own.” He also recognized that it was very important to store backups outside of ReproMAX because they need to ensure that their “mission-critical job data” is 100 percent available to all 350 of their locations.

Mind the Regulations

New regulatory pressures such as HIPAA and Sarbanes Oxley, and the need for security and privacy also fuel the need for outside help in storing data, safely and securely. Storage services providers take advantage of tested, state-of-the-art technology to back up, archive and restore data quickly. In many cases, these regulations require an auditing process to ensure that data is protected. MSPs have the expertise to deal with these new considerations and have deeper resources to help in an emergency.

In-plants must take steps to protect their businesses and their customers by taking a hard look at their data protection needs. Consider not only the medium used for backups, where backups are stored and how often they are done, but think also about restoration requirements, so you can be sure data is restored in a timely manner. IPG

Bruce Carlson is senior vice president of engineering and technology at IPR International, a Conshohocken, Pa.-based company focused on providing clients with immediate, online storage and restoration of their critical intellectual assets. He cofounded IPR’s precursor, DataGuard Group, LLC, in 1998. Prior to that he was vice president of Virtual International & Infinite Access, Inc. With more than 24 years in the communications and computer-related industries, Bruce has honed his talents in design, engineering and operation of high-speed wide area data networks, and the integration of software services and data networks. Bruce has designed, installed and maintained private, nationwide fiber backbone networks serving major companies including SunGard and Bank of America. Contact him at: Bruce.Carlson@iprintl.com