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Computerworld - In 1992, political strategist James Carville was credited with four simple words to keep candidate Bill Clinton on message: "It's the economy, stupid!" For the backup and recovery market, I'm proposing a similar four-word mantra: "It's the restore, stupid!"

Perhaps backup and recovery needs to be rebranded "recovery and backup." Like Kraft's "cheese and macaroni" campaign, recovery should be elevated to primary importance. You can do the best backup in the world, but if you can't recover your data quickly and with 100% certainty, it's for naught.

For most businesses, the standard recovery and backup solution hasn't changed for decades: tape. Every day, every business backs up every server to tape and then physically moves those tapes off-site to a secure location for disaster protection.

The problem is that even in best-of-class IT shops, an estimated 20% of all backups fail to fully recover. When servers move outside of class-A data centers, such as remote or branch offices, departmental servers, midmarket enterprises or small businesses, these failure rates escalate to 50%.

	Bob Cramer is CEO of LiveVault, a provider of managed online server backup, vaulting and recovery services. He can be reached at bcramer@livevault.com.

What's the impact? Lost productivity and profits, lost revenues and customers. More importantly, 90% of businesses that lose their computers' data in a disaster are out of business within two years.

C-level executives with fiduciary responsibilities are now liable for proper protection of business information. Regulatory requirements further compound this liability: Financial services require off-site protection, health care legislation requires patient record confidentiality, and the Securities and Exchange Commission requires proper record retention.

The answers vary between businesses with major data centers (with top-tier extensive IT staff and comprehensive procedures) and businesses whose server operations sit outside of major data centers (remote or branch offices, departmental servers, midmarket enterprises or small businesses).

Inside major data centers

The primary causes of recovery failure are human error and improper configuration, tape media failure and mishandling. To reduce these risks, companies should:

• Regularly test and validate the configuration of backup software, open file managers and application-specific modules, and conduct backups once daily.


• Store your data off-site, in case of disaster. Use a daily tape rotation and off-site tape removal and storage service.


• Now your backup is set. But here's the kicker: Most companies assume they're safe at this point. Yet the most important part is still to come: Test and validate the recovery. Testing your disaster recovery plan to ensure your data is recoverable is crucial. It's the recovery that will save your business, not the backup.

Outside major data centers

Here the problem is more severe: The same failure points are further compounded by limited IT staff. To overcome this increased risk, businesses should consider using a new breed of managed service called "online server backup and recovery."