MASTERING MANAGEMENT
Back Up Your Road WarriorsWASHINGTON (Aug. 13, 2007) - The National Federation of Independent Business (NFIB) article, "Back Up Your Road Warriors," written by Chris Stakutis, IBM's chief technology officer, addresses the complexities and challenges facing data storage today. Whereas only a few years ago, the average office worker was assigned a space on a server that was automatically backed up daily, times have changed significantly. As the available disk data space in computers has grown exponentially, so too has the risk of data loss, because increasingly mobile business users have become more independent from the protection of safeguards provided by a company's IT department.
Mobile employees increase risk "Today's computers are far more mobile and have vastly larger disks - acting as sponges for volumes of data - holding both critical business documents, as well as personal files like MP3s, movies and photo libraries," Stakutis wrote. "The massive increase in available data space is intoxicating, especially to the mobile user." He quotes a Gartner study that predicts "nearly 80 percent of small business' critical data now resides, not on the company's internal network, but on employee laptops. "Big and small organizations include a large percentage of mobile workers, equipped with laptops that can connect wirelessly, but are frequently disconnected from the network," notes Stakutis. "Mobile workers add complexity to business IT administration because, unlike PCs tethered to a network, mobile workers are often disconnected from the network and their connectivity cannot be controlled or planned." The most important time to protect a file, according to the article, is during active creation or alteration. Mobile employees edit, add and manipulate so many different files and documents in a single day that is nearly impossible to back up every change while on the road. It's impractical to back up daily or hourly changes to a CD, and a mobile employee's IT department can't capture data changes to a server if a computer is disconnected from the network.
An inexpensive, easy-to-use solution "From corporate executives to mobile sales forces and even consumers, the value of the data on personal computers has soared," Stakutis asserts. Luckily, he says, a new style of data protection and backup has emerged. Continuous Data Protection (CDP) software solutions provide real-time data backup and constant protection of information from computer viruses, file corruption, accidental deletion or laptop theft. This new type of software captures and saves changes to documents continuously to a computer's hard drive, and sends a copy of the information to a remote server, flash drive, external hard drive or online storage service for double protection - all within milliseconds. If information on the hard drive is compromised, mobile workers can restore information that otherwise would be lost, with just a few clicks of the mouse. CDP automates the "save" process that employees should have been doing manually for years, but seldom did. "The philosophy behind continuous data protection is something like this: When a document changes, it makes an immediate local copy to a nearby network file server," Stakutis explains. "If the laptop is not connected to the server at the time of change, the information automatically backs up locally to the computer's hard drive until the next connection is established." Already, businesses and individual consumers are beginning to embrace this new method of backup. New CDP software solutions on the market are extremely affordable, available through online retailers, and the investment pays for itself the moment a computer crashes. These solutions are usually simple to set up and employees don't have to spend countless hours trying to configure the software. Stakutis asserts that failure to invest in a CDP solution is the equivalent of not using anti-virus software: It's a risk too high to take.
(Sources: IBM,
National Federation of Independent
Business) 
