Filed under General
Tagged as backup, marketing
I had to promote competitors, but in the case of backups, I think there is room for a lot of service providers. There certainly are vast numbers of people and businesses out there that still need backups. I see other online storage providers as fellow evangelists, spreading the good word of online backups, and of the importance of backing up in general. Plus, there are a lot of firms out there with a lot more marketing heft than The Backup Plan.
What is my point? Well, I’ve seen Mozy popping up in online ads all over the place, most frequently at Pandora (the awesome build-your-own internet radio station site). Mozy is owned by EMC and provides a very cost effective backup solution to end users (although there are some reports of trouble with the service). Also, Carbonite has recently hooked up with Sun to offer a 30-day trial as an option during the install of java. How huge is that?! At some point, nearly everyone installs java, so that is going to get a lot of eyes on your product. Carbonite, by the way, is also an aggressively priced service. They are top-notch, and they have a geek-tastic name.
Remember, please, backup somewhere!
The BBC has a write up on HSBC getting hit with £3m in finesrelated to data loss. On 2 separate occasions, firms within HSBC sent unencrypted customer information via snail mail! The second instance, in February, 2008, represented 180,000 customer records of policyholders of HSBC Life.
Financial institutions are actually usually pretty good about following best practices. They almost always encrypt data and usually safeguard it quite well. These cases are actually probably indicators of an uneducated group of employees who weren’t following the guidelines set out by their firms.
These occurrences underscore the importance of having good policies to protect your data, including encryption of customer information during transmission (even very analog transmission via envelope and courier) and proper backups!
By now I hope everyone knows to back up their computers. Importantly, I think everyone understands why. If you aren’t backing up, there is at least a nagging feeling that you should be. However, the idea of backing up should extend to everything that is important. 1. If you have any device that has non-standard settings, back it up. 2. Do you have a procedure within your company that is not standard? Back that up. How?
1. Chances are good that the firewall that protects your corporate network has some fairly specific settings. Make sure you save these settings and/or back up the firmware. If you are in charge of the firewall, you’ll be glad you did. If it ever fails or loses config somehow, good luck retrieving all the settings without internet access…which you won’t have until it is at least partially reconfigured. But if you have a nice backup of the settings, boom, apply it ad be on your way. The same is true of phone systems, security systems, and the like.
2. Procedures can be backed up, too. How? Through documentation. Knowledge of job funcions shouldn’t sit solely inside any one person’s head. Share and document every important thing about various jobs and procedures. Do you have a list of your top vendors? How about of your top customers? How about of your company officers? Probably…but are those lists backed up? I’ll be writing more next week about the “football” concept, a very offline way of backing up this type of info.
In the end, the bidding war between EMC and NetApp for Data Domain resulted in an all cash deal worth $2.2 Billion, with EMC Corp. as the proud new owner. That is a lot of money. The stockholders, including several VC firms stand to make a killing.
This really underscores the overall importance of backing up your data. On a much smaller scale, I read an interesting post over at the consumerist from a few months back. The gist is that a hard drive crashed, and despite the customer repeatedly stressing to the tech support how important the data was, nothing was backed up before being serviced. The takeaways are: 1. Back your stuff up in advance. Don’t wait for a failure or disaster to realize you need that data. 2. Be very choosey about who services your computer. In the end, the Best Buy evangelist team is taking care of this customer, but that wouldn’t happen to everyone.
