Every now and then I like to remind people of my book, Enterprise Systems Backup and Recovery: A Corporate Insurance Policy. Recently I had someone contact me and say that not only did they find it an easy read, but they got hooked in the introduction with the volcanoes, so I’ll quote a short excerpt to explain:
Hundreds of years ago, primitive villagers would stand at the mouth of a volcano and throw an unfortunate individual into its gaping maw as a sacrifice. In return for this sacrifice, they felt they could be assured of anything from a safe pregnancy for the chief’s wife, a bountiful harvest, a decisive victory in a war against another tribe (who presumably had no volcano to throw anyone into), and protection from bad things.
Too many companies treat a backup system like those villagers did the volcano. They sacrifice tapes to the backup system in the hope that it guarantees protection. However, when treated this way, backups offer about as much protection as the volcano that receives the sacrifice. Sacrifices to volcanoes were seen as a guarantee of protection. Similarly, backups are often seen as a guarantee of protection, even when they’re not configured or treated properly. In particular, there is a misconception that is something which is called “backup software” is installed, then a backup system has been installed.
Installing backup software is easy. Installing backup hardware is easy. Meshing the humans, the company divisions, the software and the hardware isn’t so easy. You can choose the sci fi route and try to assimilate the people, company divisions, software and hardware all into some weird cyborg collective – this might be efficient, but it would certainly be the peak of corporate dehumanizing, and perhaps should be avoided.
Or you can do the hard but ultimately fulfilling option of coming up with the policies, the procedures, the service level agreements, and the system maps. Coming up with these can be a bit of a hard slog – regardless of whether you’re a manager or an IT administrator, you’ll be asking (and having to answer) some difficult questions, and it’s imperative that the business be coached into understanding that backup and recovery is not an IT function, but something that IT merely facilitates.
If you want help with reaching that goal, that’s where Enterprise Systems Backup and Recovery: A corporate insurance policy will help you most.