VideoBy almost any yardstick, Prairie State Bank is not what you'd call a major financial institution. With a handful of branches scattered in south-central Kansas, the bank maintains a small retail business in the GWMA (Greater Wichita Metropolitan Area). How small is small? On its corporate Website, the company's management proudly proclaims that Prairie State "is the 24th largest bank in the state of Kansas."
Still, the concerns of the top executives at tiny Prairie State are probably not unlike those of high-powered bankers who run global banking giants. High on that list: how to keep computer systems up and running in case of an emergency. While it's not especially likely that terrorists will strike Augusta, Kansas (site of the bank's home office), the Sunflower State does get its fair share of tornadoes. And in 1999, an overflowing Whitewater River swelled clear up to the steps of the main office. "We had to sandbag the front doors," recalls Chip DuFriend, network administrator at the bank.
Until recently, Prairie State backed up its 16 servers to individual, onsite tape drives. But last year, the bank's Microsoft Exchange server went down and DuFriend was unable to restore the system with a tape backup. Unsettled by the experience, management at Prairie State decided to try something different, eventually signing up for a subscription service provided by StorServer Inc., in Colorado Springs, Colorado. The service enables the bank to store the data from its servers on one server at an offsite location. DuFriend says he can go online and easily recover lost or deleted data files — a revelation for managers used to working straight from tape backups. Says DuFriend: "This system is a paradigm shift for us."
Paradigm shift aptly describes what's going on in the world of disaster recovery these days. Spurred on initially by Y2K and, more recently, 9/11 and the great blackout of 2003, corporate executives are focusing on data protection like never before. According to Stamford, Connecticut-based research firm Meta Group Inc., companies spent just 3.2 percent of their IT budgets on security (employee education, business continuity, and disaster recovery) in 2001. Last year, the outlay was more like 8.2 percent — a dramatic increase.
This newfound interest in security goes beyond increased spending. Advances in technology — and a wider array of threats — have corporate executives rethinking their whole approach to disaster recovery. The days of the onsite, raised-floor room, with rows of clunky tape machines and droning cooling units, are fast disappearing. In their place: remote hot-sites, fail-over systems (backup networks that can be brought online instantly), and Web-based file storage and retrieval. Says Gregg Therkalsen, vice president of business continuity at Hopkinton, Massachusetts-based vendor EMC Corp.: "The idea of backing up info on tape, having human beings put that in a truck, and driving it away.... Well, every customer wants that to go away."
Not Every One Gets Corrupted
Ellen Christy can attest to that. Christy, director of information technology at Boston-based private-equity specialist HarbourVest Partners, says the firm used to back up its data to tape onsite. Then, at the end of each day, an employee would lug the tape home and store it on some high shelf. "But small companies grow," she notes, "and one tape becomes two, two become three...."
In early September 2001, after a six-month process, management at HarbourVest ditched its in-house tape backup, choosing instead to send the data from its 15 servers over the Internet to a remote site. The company stores 100 gigabytes of data at the site, and about half of that is base data; that is, financial records, agreements, and the like. The information, which is backed up nightly, is retained for several months. In case of an outage necessitating a massive restore, Christy says vendor AmeriVault could cut the data to tape and get it to her in around two hours.
The real selling point of the Web-based service, however, is that employees can retrieve lost or zapped data simply by going online. "The most common problem we have is people deleting files," explains Christy. "It takes 50 percent longer to restore a file using the tape-backup method."
Scrambling through reams of old tape can certainly be a laborious process. Worse, tapes and other backup media are notoriously unreliable. Experts say data gets easily corrupted, and often tape backups just plan fail. "Half the time, zip drives and tapes don't restore," insists Wally Beddoe, vice president of operations in the Stamford, Connecticut office of Telekurs Financial. "They can be a big waste of time."
To address that issue, management at the Swiss-owned supplier of financial data hired a Framingham, Massachusetts-based vendor called Connected Corp. It provides a back-up service that safeguards Telekurs Financial's distributed data — information not stored on network servers. While Telekurs does back up its commercial data to a remote site in Hartford, employees rely on their PC hard drives to store tons of information — contracts, E-mail, even application code. "All the stuff to support our business is on PCs," says CFO Mike Stisi. Moreover, Telekurs has an increasing number of employees, including programmers, who work remotely. "The stuff they have on their PCs is scary," notes Stisi. "It's hundreds of man-hours' worth of work."
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