A few weeks back I was talking with a prospect about how they back up their data. They are a small company and right now their file storage environment is decentralized; meaning they store data on various machines rather than on a single file server. The owner told me that their backup strategy is to have the office manager go around to all 10 computers every week and plug in a USB hard drive. She then runs a backup using the built in MS Windows backup program. Once a month, the owner would take one of the USB hard drives home and bring back another one; thus maintaining a monthly offsite backup.

With this strategy, any new or changed data not backed up since the last week’s backup would be lost. I asked why he wasn’t concerned about the possibility of losing a week’s worth of data, and he listed several reasons:

1. “Our data doesn’t change that much that someone won’t have a fairly recent copy of the key files somewhere.”
2. We have printouts of all the important stuff and could recreate it if he had to.
3. Even if our computers were down, we could still get product out the door.

That all sounds reasonable, right? But then I challenged him with these questions:

1. Have you ever tested the backup strategy? Can you actually get data off the backup USB Hard Drives?
2. Would it be worth checking to make sure a copy of the data exists somewhere else?
3. Have you ever analyzed your workflow to be sure you could actually do business if your systems were down?
4. Do you consistently remember to rotate the backup drive offsite?
5. How long does it take for your office manager to do the backups? What is this manual process costing the company?
6. Are you certain that the backups are actually being done on schedule?
7. Can you verify that all the data files that should be backed up are included in the manual backup set?
8. With your backup strategy do you realize you would could lose a full month of data if you lost your facility due to fire, flood, power surge, etc…?
9. What if a USB Hard drive was stolen? The data is not encrypted and can be retrieved by anyone that has possession of the hard drive unit!

This past week he called me and asked for help to create an affordable, reliable and automatic backup strategy. His organization hadn’t experienced a failure, but he’d done some investigating since we spoke and realized not only was his organization’s data at great risk, but it was time to move forward with automated, online backups. Here are the highlights of his discoveries:

1. To run the backup, the office manager needed 15 minutes to 45 minutes depending on the amount of data the particular user has. Files in use cannot be backed up, which meant that the user has limited use of their computer while the backup is running.
2. Because of scheduling, work priorities, etc, he found she was actually performing the backups once every couple weeks at best.
3. If she had been doing the backup of every computer, every week as he’d thought, it would be costing the organization approximately $100 a week, before overtime, at her present salary. Nearly five hours per week would be spent running backups!
4. The final straw: He and his office manager tried restoring the data to one of the computers but had no instructions on how to find the files to restore or where to put the restored files.

My new customer was lucky. He found out BEFORE a crash or disaster that he needed to revamp his backup strategy. How sound are your plans? If you’re not sure, contact us for a free consultation and analysis of your backup strategy.

If you’re a manager, supervisor, or HR professional, have you ever cringed at what you thought you saw on someone’s screen as you came around the corner? Was there something inappropriate there before the screen suddenly changed to a website? If employees are surfing inappropriate websites while you’re around, are you concerned what they might be looking at when you’re not in the office? How about after hours if you run multiple shifts?

Allowing (or passively ignoring) employees surfing inappropriate websites introduces many business risks that you need to be aware of:

1. Makes the employees e-mail, along with everyone else’s email more susceptible to spam (unsolicited junk email). While there are things Centrend can do to reduce or virtually eliminate SPAM from your email inboxes, why exacerbate the problem?

2. Can introduce viruses and spyware into the system. Sites with explicit content are often used to distribute spyware and viruses to obtain banking and credit card information, or just destroy data.

3. Sexual Harassment – For example, an employee feels uncomfortable from seeing pornography on a coworker’s screen

Aside from the employee looking at inappropriate web sites, how much time is being lost through their surfing? The same concerns applied to the flood of jokes that get forwarded around.

Unless you take away Internet access completely, you can’t stop 100% of inappropriate or excessive surfing. But there are some things that you can do minimize the problem and mitigate the risks. Here are a few quick tips:

1. Make an acceptable Internet use policy part of your employee handbook. The policy should define when personal surfing and e-mail is allowed (lunch breaks, etc…) and clearly state that inappropriate surfing and e-mail is never acceptable.

2. Your firewall should be able to return information about your users browsing activity. It’s easy to set up and a powerful deterrent against inappropriate or time wasting surfing. If you are planning to monitor however, you should notify the employee that such monitoring can and will take place at random.

3. Beyond monitoring, you can implement a technology solution to block inappropriate content. With the right systems in place, you can filter problem e-mail from getting in or out and you can return a “BLOCKED WITH WARNING” page when an employee attempts to access an inappropriate site.

For a free consultation and assistance in protecting your business from problematic surfing and email issues, contact us at www.centrend.com or 888-558-9550.

Thank you for visiting Centrend’s Technology Results Blog.

Business leaders are faced with making decisions every day about what technology to invest in now and in the future. With all the technical buzzwords and catch phrases, it can be a significant challenge to decide what to do. Experience shows that the wrong technology decision can have serious financial and business consequences.

The mission of our blog is to serve the community as an invaluable resource providing practical advice and strategy for leveraging technology in your business. We promise to communicate in laymen’s terms as much as possible and will include links to our online technology glossary where appropriate.

Thank you to all our friends, vendors and customers for your trust and support and we encourage you to register with the site to ask questions and post your comments on the articles presented.

Sincerely,

The Centrend Consulting Team