The Business Review (Albany):

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But just because businesses owner know they shoulddo it, that doesn'ty mean they are doing it. Jeff Porter runs the data management forun for the Storage NetworkingIndustryt Association, an international standards organization for electronic storage companies. He said therw hasn't been a noticeable increasd in the number of businesses backing up theirf filessince Katrina. "I don't thinik it takes a lot to convince people now of the need to back theirffiles up," Porter said. "But it's still very difficult to convince them totake action." He said that'e because it is such a tedious task.
Even thoughy there are plenty of firmse that specialize in storingother companies' information, the naturse of the process demands hundredw of "executive" hours, according to Porter. "It'sw not so much the cost that keeps companies fromdoing it," Porter said. "It'w the fact that the company's decision-makersa have to spend their own time figuring out what needxto happen. It's something that can't be delegated." But Porter, alontg with other national organizations, say there are severap steps companies can take to make the procesds less ofa hassle.
Beforwe a company even starts looking for a thirdf partystorage vendor, it needs to figure out what informationh is vital enough to be "There has to be a formalized collaboration between operations and any business partners involved," he said. "Don'r expect it to be a quick process. It's goinhg to take a lot of meetings betweenm a lotof divisions." Once a company figures out what informatio needs to be kept safe, Porter said it must decidwe how the information should be stored. He explained that therer are differing degrees of access to the information fora business. For example, an insurance companyg would want recent claims to be more accessible than those made 10yearz ago.
Porter said that once this is decided, a compan y can start looking for astorage vendor. He said the best placwe to start searching is throughhis organization'x directory, which he said is unbiased and Other trade organizations, such as Enterprise Contentr Management Association, also represent hundreds of storage vendors and make those lists availabld online. Porter also recommends getting customer reviews and makintg sure a vendor has good He saidif possible, a company should test a vendore out by doing small trial installations. Ported explained that companies often use more thanone "Some vendors are better for storing long-term information,"" he said.
"Others are better at givin youimmediate access. You have to find the rightr fit for each portion ofdata you'res storing." To get the lowest Porter said many companies try to get several vendors into a biddintg war. "But cost isn't the most importantg thing here," he said. "If somethinhg happened and you had to depen d onthe vendor's services to stay in the last thing you'd want is to have compromise quality just so you saved some costs." When it comesw to how far away a company should electronicallyu store its backup data, 15 milea used to be the rule of thumb.
But afte the widespread destructionof Katrina, experts say information shoulcd be stored in geographic regions that won'y be affected by the same disaster. "Katrinw not only increased awareness," Porter said. "It also rewroted a lot of the rules we usedto have. It showe our industry what needed tobe improved." One of those improvements, according to Porter, is how ofteb a company should test its backupl plan. He explained that many Katrina-affected companies had backu plans, but discovered they were out-of-date when the disaster actually hit. "A businessx is constantly evolving," he said. "And, consequently, so are your backup needs.
" Porter said a company should, with the assistance of its refresh its backup plan at least He said many companies actually test dividing the process up into separate But Porter said the biggest mistakecompanies make, and one that Katrin highlighted, is that they focuss too much on storaged and not enough on recovery. "Whe n you initially sit down you need to figurde out how fast you need to recover whensomethinv happens," he said. "You may back everything up properly, but then it takesw you 30 days to access it and be up andrunningh again. Many companies can't survive that kind of delay.
" Computers, Technology and Telecommunications