Backup your desktops as well as your servers

Advice 2010-02-24 11:16

David Blackman, general manager Northern Europe, Acronis says organisations need a centralised backup and recovery

According recent findings from IDC, more than half (53 percent) of all organisations have deployed a software or service for PC backup.

While it’s encouraging to see an increasing number of organisations are using a software/service for PC backup and recovery, it’s worth pointing out that nearly a third (32.5 percent) of organisations are relying on individual employees to back up data themselves.
One thing you can be sure of with computers is that, eventually, they will break down. With time and budgets at a premium, putting the onus on individual employees could spell disaster. It’s very easy for employees to forget, to be offsite or simply have no time to do the important back up. Even if staff are saving files to the server (which is backed up) a lot of data still resides on people’s workstations including financial figures, competitor information and customer data In fact, research has shown that up to 60 percent of an organisation’s data is saved on their workstations not on their servers.

The best strategy resellers can recommend to organisations if for them to backup their laptops and PCs as well as their servers. The value of data is becoming crucial to any company’s success. Downtime and the associated potential of data loss can be costly incidents. Resellers can help make organisations aware that there are multiple threats to systems – natural disasters can strike, but that actually a failure is far more likely to be caused by human error, a hard drive crash or virus attack. The loss of data, coupled with the sheer disruption and downtime caused by system failures, is enough to make any business person shiver.

Stop your business going down with your systems!
What is needed is a centralised backup and recovery solution, protecting both workstations and servers, which resellers can help organisations set up. But it’s not just about making sure the data is backed up. The method and strategy need to be examined too. Relying on a traditional ‘end of day’ backup strategy can cause a number of potential problems. If a disaster strikes five minutes before the next backup is due to be made (or 23 hours and 55 minutes since the previous one) all the new and/or amended data created that day will be lost. Furthermore, it could take days to recover the previous day’s data.

It’s also worth noting that some backup systems can only recover file level data, and can’t restore applications or systems settings. Subsequent redeployment is therefore a labour-intensive and time-consuming procedure, requiring the person in charge of IT to find all the original software disks and reset system preferences by hand.