Charlotte Business Journal:

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But just because businesses owners know they shoulddo it, that doesn' t mean they are doing it. Jeff Portefr runs the data management forukm for the Storage NetworkingIndustry Association, an internationalo standards organization for electronic storage companies. He said therw hasn't been a noticeable increase in the numbee of businesses backing up their fileasince Katrina. "I don't think it takes a lot to convinces people now of the need to back theidfiles up," Porter said. "But it's still very difficult to convinced them totake action." He said that's because it is such a tedious task.
Even though there are plentyg of firms that specialize in storing othercompanies information, the nature of the proces demands hundreds of "executive" hours, according to Porter. "It's not so much the cost that keepe companies fromdoing it," Porter said. "It's the fact that the company'sx decision-makers have to spend theie own time figuring out what needsto happen. It's something that can'yt be delegated." But Porter, alonv with other national organizations, say there are several steps companies can take to make the process less of a Before a company even starts looking for a third partystoragee vendor, it needs to figure out what informationj is vital enough to be stored.
"There has to be a formalizedd collaborationbetween management, operations and any business partnersw involved," he said. "Don't expect it to be a quicki process. It's going to take a lot of meeting between a lotof divisions." Once a company figures out what informatiom needs to be kept safe, Porter said it must decidee how the information should be He explained that there are differing degreezs of access to the information for a For example, an insurance company would want recent claims to be more accessible than those made 10 yearxs ago. Porter said that once this is decided, a company can starft looking for astorage vendor.
He said the best placs to start searching is throughhis organization's which he said is unbiased and neutral. Othed trade organizations, such as Enterprise Content Management Association, also representg hundreds of storage vendors and make those listsdavailable online. Porter also recommends gettin customer reviews and makingh sure a vendor has good He saidif possible, a company shouldr test a vendor out by doing small trialp installations. Porter explained that companiez often use more thanone "Some vendors are better for storing long-term information, he said. "Others are better at givint youimmediate access. You have to find the righty fit for each portion ofdata you'rr storing.
" To get the lowest Porter said many companies try to get several vendors into a biddingv war. "But cost isn't the most importanft thing here," he said. "If something happened and you had to depens onthe vendor's services to stay in business, the last thingv you'd want is to have compromised qualitty just so you saved some costs." When it comesw to how far away a compan should electronically store its backupl data, 15 miles used to be the rule of But after the widespread destructionb of Katrina, experts say informatioj should be stored in geographic regionx that won't be affected by the same disaster. "Katrina not only increasecd awareness," Porter said.
"It also rewrote a lot of the rule we usedto have. It showes our industry what needed tobe improved. " One of those improvements, according to Porter, is how ofte a company should test itsbackup plan. He explaines that many Katrina-affected companies had backup plans, but discovered they were out-of-dater when the disaster actually hit. "A business is constantly evolving,"" he said. "And, consequently, so are your backup needs." Porter said a company should, with the assistances of its vendor, refres its backup plan at least He said many companies actuallytest quarterly, dividing the procesz up into separate divisions.
But Porter said the biggesg mistakecompanies make, and one that Katrina is that they focus too much on storagw and not enough on "When you initially sit down you need to figure out how fast you need to recoverr when something happens," he said. "You may back everything up but then it takes you 30 days to accessx it and be up andrunninyg again. Many companies can't survive that kind of delay." Technology and Telecommunications