Free Data Storage & Online Backup to 300 Top Students
The Wall Street Journal carries a summary of a pretty savvy marketing move by EMC. EMC, which is one of the biggest players in backup and data management, is celebrating their 30th anniversary by offering free data storage and backups to 300 top students from around the world. This is one of those brilliant marketing moves. If all goes well, those 300 students will be loyal customers for life. Gievn that they are top students, it stands to reason that they will be influential, decision-maker-types in their future jobs, and given their loyalty to EMC, may recommend EMS soultions in the future. Add to that lots of excitement at schools, with folks nominating their favorite picks or trying to win the prize, lots of free press and writeups of…hey, wait a minute…
Three NAS Devices For Efficient Small-Office Backup
Bill O’Brien, writing for PC World, has a pretty detailed review on 3 NAS (plus one DAS) device for SMB backups. NAS devices are network attached storage, basically a hard drive array with a tiny operating system and a network card. The draw is that they can be configured and then added to your network and used from anyplace that has network access. This makes them great for file storage and the first stage of backups. DAS is direct attached storage, basically a USB drive.
NAS and DAS make great places to save files or do your initial backup. I would be remiss if I did not further recommend actually backing up offsite. Theft, fire etc at your office would make your NAS kindof useless.
Online Backup Marketing – Taking it up a notch!
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!
HSBC fined for data loss
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!
Twitter hacked and iTunes loses data
The evil nemesis of backups is data loss. Lots of data loss comes from accidents, but sometimes it is the result of malicious acts.
Twitter was recently totally hacked (TechCrunch has a great article). Hundreds of confidential documents were stolen and posted. Users’ emails were posted. The actual admin interface of twitter itself was hacked. In this case, the hacker, “Hacker Croll” really did not do a lot of damage. There are problems, of course, mostly coming from scrambling by the twitter folks. But Croll could have done a lot more bad than he did.
Here are some important points:
1. Back your stuff up in a different location…that way, if you get hacked and they deface or delete data, you still have it.
2. Practice safe computing. Use good passwords, etc. Twitter’s password was…”password” – To quote (from memory, so it could be wrong) SpaceBalls, “What kind of idiot uses 12345 as their combination”
Meanwhile, there is a security hole in the iTunes store that displays full credit card information, which is not PCI compliant and is against VISA and Mastercard policies. Croll leveraged this while hacking the heck out of twitter, but it could be happening to a lot of unware, less famous individuals even as I type.