{"id":627,"date":"2009-06-28T07:23:23","date_gmt":"2009-06-27T21:23:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/nsrd.wordpress.com\/?p=627"},"modified":"2018-12-12T16:00:48","modified_gmt":"2018-12-12T06:00:48","slug":"backup-is-insurance","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/nsrd.info\/blog\/2009\/06\/28\/backup-is-insurance\/","title":{"rendered":"Backup is insurance"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Over at The Daily WTF, there&#8217;s a story at the moment about a company that went out of <a title=\"Death by Delete\" href=\"http:\/\/thedailywtf.com\/Articles\/Death-by-Delete.aspx\" target=\"_blank\">business due to a developer deleting the company database<\/a> for which there were no backups. Lamentably, this is still a common story. Oh, in many cases backups may actually be taken, but it&#8217;s still the case that we see situations such as:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Backups are never taken off-site,<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><em>or<\/em><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Backups are never even taken out of a tape drive (i.e., constantly overwritten),<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><em>or<\/em><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Backups are never checked.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>My book is <em>titled<\/em> <a title=\"Enterprise Systems Backup: A Corporate Insurance Policy\" href=\"http:\/\/www.amazon.com\/gp\/redirect.html?ie=UTF8&amp;location=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.amazon.com%2FEnterprise-Systems-Backup-Recovery-Corporate%2Fdp%2F1420076396%3Fie%3DUTF8%26s%3Dbooks%26qid%3D1221104920%26sr%3D8-1&amp;tag=entesystbacka-20&amp;linkCode=ur2&amp;camp=1789&amp;creative=9325\" target=\"_blank\">Enterprise Systems Backup and Recovery: A Corporate Insurance Policy<\/a>. That&#8217;s <em>how much<\/em> backup, to me, represents insurance. It&#8217;s the level of insurance necessary for any business to survive a disaster.<\/p>\n<p>Failing to treat backup as insurance is unfortunately still familiar. The ever obvious-stating Gartner is frequently quoted as saying that one in three companies hit by a disaster will be unprepared and lose <em>critical<\/em> data.<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;d like to hope that within my career we&#8217;ll see that percentage shrink considerably \u2013 one in three is an unacceptably high number. One in a hundred might be more acceptable, but realistically, one in twenty would be a good number to start aiming for.<\/p>\n<p>How do we aim for such an improvement? It&#8217;s remarkably simple, and comes from a few basic rules:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Backup is insurance, it&#8217;s not an IT process.<\/li>\n<li>Backup requires buy-in from all aspects of a company.<\/li>\n<li>Backup budget is sourced from the entire company, not the IT budget.<\/li>\n<li>Company policies should prohibit deployment of new systems without a backup\/recovery policy.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>A good backup system comprises no more than 50% IT infrastructure and operations. The rest stems from policies, procedures, planning and awareness. Paraphrasing what I state in the introduction to my book, <em>having backup software does not mean you have a backup system<\/em>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Over at The Daily WTF, there&#8217;s a story at the moment about a company that went out of business due&hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[5,17],"tags":[138,486],"class_list":["post-627","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-backup-theory","category-policies","tag-backup","tag-insurance"],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pKpIN-a7","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/nsrd.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/627","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/nsrd.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/nsrd.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nsrd.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nsrd.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=627"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/nsrd.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/627\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7643,"href":"https:\/\/nsrd.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/627\/revisions\/7643"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/nsrd.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=627"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nsrd.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=627"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nsrd.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=627"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}