When an Attleboro-based construction company’s computer server crashed recently, the tape drive backing up the company’s critical software failed to do its job.
Fortunately, technology support staff dispatched from CMIT Solutions of Greater Providence to deal with the minor disaster was able to retrieve the company’s data from the prior day’s backup tape. But the server crash illustrated a weakness in the disaster-protection and data-recovery mechanisms built into the IT networks of many small businesses, according to local IT experts.
Small businesses have traditionally relied exclusively on tape drives to back up their servers, leaving them at risk of losing all their critical software and data in the event of a fire, flood, theft, or other disaster, said Michael Stenhouse, owner of CMIT Solutions of Greater Providence, one of two franchises in the state for the national IT services provider.
Even in a more-limited crisis – for example, the meltdown of a motherboard on an older server – tape drives often fail, Stenhouse said. Forty-two percent of attempted data recoveries from tape backup in the past year did not work for one reason or another, he said, citing a recent Microsoft report.
At the same time, Stenhouse offered another statistic that should cause many small business owners to rethink their disaster-protection strategies: Seven out of 10 small firms go out of business within a year if they experience a major data loss that cannot be recovered, according to Pricewaterhouse Coopers.
Stenhouse estimated that 90 percent of small businesses he comes in contact with rely solely on tape drives to support their servers.
“That’s the standard, that’s the old way, and tape backup has severe limitations and severe issues,” he said. “Most people think they’re totally secure with that, and they’re really not.”
Almost no large company still relies on tape drives to support its servers. But until recently, the upfront cost of state-of-the-art data backup and recovery solutions was out of reach for many small businesses; corporations have traditionally paid big vendors more than $10,000 annually for a comprehensive, offsite, data-protection solution, Stenhouse said.
But CMIT Solutions is among a growing number of IT service providers that have begun marketing more-affordable disaster protection solutions to small businesses, based on the same technology used by Fortune 500 companies.
In the past couple of years, IT support firms have begun offering small businesses a range of Web-based, managed data-protection solutions that can cost a small office with not a lot of data as little as $80 per month.
The new breed of managed-service data solutions offer a range of data backup, retrieval and archiving functions, enabling the service provider to remotely monitor and protect data via the Internet, said Eric Shorr, president of PC Troubleshooters in Warwick.
“Tape drives have problems,” he said. “No one ever checks them, sometimes people forget to take them off site or people forget to change the tape. Or what happens a lot – and I’ve seen this quite often – people think the tape drive is working fine, and then they have some kind of problem where they have to go to the tape, and they find out the tape is no good.”
PC Troubleshooters, which started marketing managed-service data solutions about two years ago, offers a system that encrypts data collected by a device put on a server and sends it via the Internet to a data warehouse.
The firm also offers a hybrid data protection and recovery system that continually backs up data locally, using a continuous data protection device (CDP) placed on the computer network. The system can also be configured to store data off site. But some businesses choose the tape-less CDP system as a way to back up their data without further taxing their limited bandwidth, Shorr said.
“Online services work great if you don’t have that much data,” he said. “But if you have a lot of data – I’m talking probably over 5 gigabytes of data – it tends to get a little cumbersome to send everything off site.”
Pushing aggressively into the space, CMIT Solutions recently introduced a new, managed-service data protection solution that offers businesses virtually uninterrupted access to their data in the event of a disaster, by storing a virtual copy of a client’s entire server network.
“We have the whole image of that server on this backup device that we have onsite locally, and all we have to do is change a few IP addresses around and you can temporarily run your business off the backup device while you are getting your server fixed,” Stenhouse said.
The solution, which costs about $300 per month for basic service, also enables businesses to restore the settings, data and flow of new servers immediately, without having to rebuild them one by one. Otherwise, replacement servers can take days to rebuild, he said.
And unlike servers backed up by tape drives, CMIT’s virtual servers also enable companies that have suffered a disaster to upgrade their IT network when rebuilding their servers, rather than having to bring in the exact same server configuration you had before in order to restore the data, Stenhouse said. •
