Remote backup of data can be key to survival

Karen Nitkin

Special to The Daily Record

Taken from Online Backup Review. 

Simon Tutt, the president of DP Solutions, says companies often approach his firm for disaster recovery services only after they’ve been through an emergency. “Either they’ve experienced an emergency and realized they weren’t prepared, or they know someone who has,” he said. But all companies, even ones as small as a single person working on a single laptop, need to protect the information and infrastructure on their computers from physical and virtual shutdowns. And companies that provide remote backup services offer a range of options to meet those requirements. 

The idea is simple: By locating copies of your information somewhere else, you have insurance in the event that you can’t access your own files, whether because of fires or floods, or computer hardware malfunctions or viruses. As Tutt noted, remote backup can be the difference between a company that survives a disaster and one that is forced to go out of business. A company that can’t access information for several days is in danger of losing clients, he said, and those clients might never return.  James Gohng is director of business development at Baltimore Technology Park, which provides remote backup for companies large and small. “Most companies, if not all, are doing this,” he said. Companies are now so reliant on computers that a single crash can be disastrous, he noted.The data center at Baltimore Technology Park is literally a large, humming room, with raised floors and appropriate heating and air conditioning to handle client servers. 

Security is tight, with 24-hour monitoring, access control cards, silent alarms and fire detectors. Clients install their own equipment and generally manage it themselves, backing up their information through tapes, third parties or network-based solutions. “We provide a facility,” Gohng said. 

DP Solutions, in Columbia, has a similar data center, as well as an off-site center for added security. Obviously, greater protection is more expensive. Is backing up information once a week enough? How about once a day? Or would you prefer that every keystroke is saved as it is created? Does every function of your company require saving, or is some information less than “mission critical?”Many companies are required by regulations such as Sarbanes-Oxley to save information for specific periods of time, and need remote backup as a guarantee. “We start with a conversation and information-gathering,” said Tutt. Remote backup has been around for a long time. It is standard operating procedure as companies shift from physical pieces of paper to information stored in computers and on hard drives. Tutt, whose company dates back to 1971, noted that interest picked up after Sept. 11, 2001, when it became clear that vast amounts of information could be lost in ways that might be beyond imagination. He also said people spend more on remote backups during recessions, when they may be less able to recover from a disaster. He recalled one client, a company that was in a building that was damaged by Hurricane Isabel in 2003. For days, workers could not get into the building to retrieve information. “They couldn’t do a thing,” he said. “They couldn’t even enter the office.” Because their data had been stored at DP Solutions, “We literally set them up here,” Tutt said. “We gave them personal computers, and they linked to our systems. They never lost one keystroke.” Said Tutt: “That could have been the difference between being in business and being out of business.”