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I work full-time as an IT manager, and once in a while, I accept little contracts for SMBs when the job is short and the money is good.

About a year ago, I was contacted by “Greg,” the computer guy in a construction company, for help migrating a server to VMware. Greg had been given my name by the company’s accountant, who had once been a summer student with a company I used to work for. (I found out later that the new server project was the accountant’s initiative, and he was not comfortable with Greg’s skills.) Since Greg was alone doing IT at the construction company, it was an administrator position even if his knowledge and experience was that of a first-level technician.

Backups are one of those things that never really get a sense of importance until that data, that email or server being restored becomes crucial. What we need to consider in this space is the cost of a restore failure on an important transaction with the cost of providing an effective backup infrastructure. I remember speaking with an IT Manager who was saying that he’d been trying to get investment for the backups and it’s only when because the organization couldn’t restore an email showing that the order had been made for a transaction, that the business lost thousands of pounds, that suddenly the investment became available.

At the same time, we need to continually approach the backups, clarifying:

• What needs backed up
• What within that backup is crucial and what is ‘dead data’ – do we backup temporary internet files, all logs or just specific elements that are needed for diagnosis/reporting or audit purposes.
• What level of backup and for how long? – Restore an entire server, restore for up to 7 years
• What regulatory issues apply to my business in relation to customer data/backups?

This becomes eve more relevant in light of the different business mergers and acquisitions we’ve seen around the city, coupled with the ever increasing volume of data, just a few years ago the server drives might have been 36GB, maybe 72GB, increasingly we see file or database servers with terrabytes of data, do we back this all up? What is core data, and what is expendable? What is the capacity of our backups long term? Do we want to do backups or hand it over to someone else, and what are the issues surrounding that related to compliance and legislation?

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