If you lose your data, you could lose your business (Globe & Mail)
Small and medium-sized businesses are highly vulnerable to a range of cyberthreats, experts say. Backing up your data is vital, they tell GEORGE BUTTERS
Special to The Globe and Mail
What's your database of customer information worth?
That's a question Barry L. Dennis, president of Dennis Financial Inc. in Fredericton, has given a lot of thought to since a computer virus corrupted his database of more than 10,000 business contacts developed over a dozen years as a financial adviser.
"The bottom line is that you are at a standstill," he says. "Your focus changes from being in business to getting back into business."
Mr. Dennis was able to restore his data from backups. He now has the information mirrored to a second server and is more vigilant about antivirus protection, but insists that his staff have access to the database, despite the likelihood that the virus gained entry to the central file server from an office workstation. "If I wasn't sharing it," he says, "they wouldn't be empowered."
Was it a scary experience?
"Yes," he says. "Yes, it was."
Yvonne Morrison-Miller knows how he feels, adding: "I never want to go through that again."
Her video production company -- Little Red Hen Productions in Hamilton -- creates motion graphics and special effects for such clients as Universal Studios and the Outdoor Broadcast Network.
"My whole hard drive failed," she says. "Two months of work was on that computer. I didn't have a backup of my most recent project. A lot of work was done and delivered to the client, but the movie project hadn't been delivered yet. That was the scariest part."
But surely everyone who works on a computer has at least heard the dictum from the computer gurus: Back up everything because at some point -- not if but when -- your data will be destroyed.
"When you're really into a project, you're not thinking about backups," Ms. Morrison-Miller says. "You're thinking about the project."
Computer Associates International, Inc. released a study in late June confirming suspicions that small and medium businesses are generally highly vulnerable to a range of cyberthreats.
The study found that even a quarter of the larger SMBs still used non-expert staff to maintain their IT systems. That number doubled for smaller businesses and small office-home office, or SOHO, operations.
The study also confirmed that many SMBs have surprisingly complex computer systems, yet employ manual security processes. Only 25 per cent used automated backup software while 20 per cent have no backup system at all. As well, about a third of those who backup their data haven't checked the validity of those backups in more than a year.
"That's quite accurate," says Chris Jones, director of business development at Recovery Force Inc. in Guelph, Ont., who helped recover Ms. Morrison-Miller's files.
But he notes an even scarier statistic from a report issued by the National Archives and Records Administration in Washington: "Nearly half of businesses that experience catastrophic data loss fail immediately." That report also said 93 per cent of those businesses that suffered a data loss of 10 days or more went bankrupt within a year after the incident.
Different studies reach different conclusions about the specifics of data loss, but tend to agree on the list of most-to-least likely causes of data disruption: hardware and software problems, human error, computer viruses and natural disasters.
There's also general agreement that a primary reason for a data loss turning from inconvenience to catastrophe is the failure of backup systems to properly restore data after the initial incident.
"Information is the heart and soul of any organization," says Tim Margeson, general manager of CBL Data Recovery in Markham, Ont. "Unfortunately, most people don't test their backups. They don't check it. They don't run a fire drill for themselves."
Some backup programs, for instance, ignore software that is open and active at the time of the backups. "If your e-mail software is open, for example," he says, "it may not be getting backed up."
Many businesses that suffer data loss are too embarrassed to talk about it publicly, but even nameless stories help illustrate the potential for disaster, such as the fast-food outlet that used someone low on the totem pole -- working the night-shift on minimum wage -- to perform the nightly backup of the store's point-of-sale system.
"The backup consisted of a set of four diskettes," Mr. Jones says, but somehow one diskette went astray. "The person changing them put in disk No. 1 again when it asked for No. 4." When the hard drive crashed, there was nothing to restore. A month's worth of sales data had to be manually re-entered into the system.
Mr. Margeson says that even when backups are made and tested, they're often degraded by poor storage practices.
"Backups need to be stored in a cool, dry place, away from direct sunlight. Not under your desk next to a heat vent, or sitting on a window sill," he says.
"Ultimately, you want to have a full archival backup offsite."
But he acknowledges that many SMBs will have to peer into the abyss before properly protecting their vital data: "It will take a disaster, unfortunately.
"That's what it will take."
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