October 2005

Above: Bill Tyres, president of Great Lakes Record Center, says offsite storage can be part of a company's disaster plan. Photo by Marc Golub.

Disaster Aftermath: BE PREPARED
Offsite and online storage safeguard company records
by Kathy Walker

When a hurricane hits or some other disaster makes your office uninhabitable, are your data and your business secured?

“Planning needs to begin long before the disaster occurs,” said Dianna Yount, a project manager for Great Lakes Record Center in Mentor.

Disaster prevention is the key to disaster recovery.

“Many companies don’t have a comprehensive list of phone numbers and names,” Yount said. “How do we find where to tell you where to go? What if checkbooks are burned—is there a credit card? Core information needs to be stored offsite.”

Bill Tyres, president of Great Lakes, said that prior to Hurricane Katrina in September, offsite storage was “just a space consideration. But now it is a disaster recovery consideration.” He foresees a time when insurance companies will start asking for business interruption insurance. This cost can be modulated by disaster prevention measures.

Prior to preparing a plan, Yount looks at her client’s facility and does a weighted risk analysis. She analyzes the likelihood of flood, tornado, train crash or the like. In this initial review, Great Lakes audits safety, security and operations. Additional business needs such as OSHA compliance can also be assessed.

Yount next obtains an organizational chart with departmental names from her client. She determines the key crucial people required to set up shop. Department officers are interviewed to identify core business operations.

The final disaster plan includes a call tree and notification statements, a disaster plan manual and designees for the disaster plan team. It includes an emergency kit preparation, media statements, inventory templates, incident report templates and a disaster test program.

Pragmatically, Yount offers a mock drill. “Your building burned down last night. Here is your info. Can you do business? Where is stuff missing?”

A practical aspect of using offsite storage lies in controlling storage costs. Banks, hospitals and insurance companies tend to use Great Lakes for offsite data and tape storage.

Great Lakes Record Center bar-codes boxes for easy tracking. Businesses can access records on a daily basis. Some businesses, such as doctors’ offices, may do up to 20 file pulls a day. Data can be looked up by box and by content of the box.
Accountants and lawyers who used to keep records in their basements also use the storage company. “Identity theft has increased the need for secure, offsite storage,” Tyres said.
Last, the Sarbanes-Oxley Act is a boon to the offsite storage business. Put into effect in the wake of the Enron scandal, the act is meant to facilitate truthful accounting and disclosure at publicly traded companies. It mandates retention of audit and review work papers for five years.

Data is protected at Great Lakes by a climate-controlled, sprinkler environment. Access is restricted. No one gets in without a proper sign-in or escort. Clients can even specify when data expires, and Great Lakes can shred the expired files. This is useful for businesses such as medical offices, which may often keep sensitive information like social security numbers.

Storing records online

Another way to avert potential disaster is by storing information online.

One company to provide secure online backup and data recovery is California-based EVault. Erin Lutz, EVault spokesman, said the terrorist attack of Sept. 11, 2001, was “one of the first events that made disaster recovery come to the forefront of awareness from a corporate perspective.”

There are reasons outside of disaster recovery planning to consider online data storage.

“I happen to be Joe Smith and I accidentally deleted a file. Or I am a sales rep and a lot of info is on my laptop. I go through Dallas Fort-Worth airport and I drop my laptop on the ground. All these can be reasons for data loss. There are so many things that can happen, not a natural disaster per se,” Lutz said.

Online data storage is an everyday business continuity issue; it’s not just a disaster planning consideration.

Businesses with heavy data backup requirements may save by doing it online. Backup media is expensive. So is keeping an information technology person on staff.

Drowning in data

Online backup has been around since the advent of the Internet, but the market is growing.

“What we’ve seen happen is, the Internet wire speeds or the rate at which data travels over the Internet has gotten faster and the security protocols have become better and better. Growth in popularity in online backup has benefited from speed of transmission and security. Now, because of the tremendous advances in data transmission, customers are more comfortable doing this,” Lutz said.

“We’ve also seen this tremendous growth in company data. Companies are drowning in the amount of data they have. And regulatory growth, keeping info for specified number of years. There are mandates for keeping a lot of info. A lot of companies are overwhelmed with the amount of data they need to keep, even on an hourly basis.”

Tapes are the traditional medium for data storage, but tapes can grow legs. “When you’re trying to lock down data, the fact that you have corporate data on a physical, transportable medium is a problem if you are trying to secure it. If it gets lost, itgone for good,” Lutz said.

At EVault, data is transferred over the Internet to an offsite storage area. The data is encrypted at all times. There is never a point at which data can be stolen.

From a disaster recovery perspective, online data storage is a good solution. Most online storage businesses have servers in several places.

EVault has seven sites around the United States. Generally, companies can choose where they have their data backed up, “like if your business is in San Francisco, you might want to choose Atlanta, Ga,” Lutz said.

Low-cost solution

Bond Technologies of Willoughby Hills uses a secure online data backup service that moves data out to an offsite location automatically. Bond’s primary business is assisting small companies with Quickbooks financial software and computer technology. One of Bond’s planning and advisory services is to help clients understand their offsite storage options.

President Scott Gregory stresses that even the smallest business needs an online solution.

Cost is surprisingly low. A very small, secure Internet vault is $99/year. Storage costs can go up to $600 per year, a minor expense in relation to the data a business is trying to protect.

“Katrina will affect offsite data storage for a short while until it fades into the background, Gregory said. “But it will enhance interest in the topic for a period of time.”

Kathy Walker is a freelance writer in Cleveland.