Minneapolis / St. Paul Business Journal:

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But just because businesses owners know they shoulddo it, that doesn'ty mean they are doing it. Jeff Porter runs the data managemen forum for the Storage NetworkingIndustryh Association, an international standards organization for electronic storage companies. He said there hasn't been a noticeable increase in the number of businessexs backing up their filessincre Katrina. "I don't think it takees a lot to convincd people now of the need to back theiefiles up," Porter said. "But it's still very difficultf to convince them totake action." He said that's because it is such a tediouds task.
Even though there are plentty of firms that specializ in storingother companies' information, the naturee of the process demands hundreds of "executive" hours, accordinhg to Porter. "It's not so much the cost that keepes companies fromdoing it," Porter said. "It's the fact that the company' decision-makers have to spend their own time figuringf out what needsto happen. It's somethingb that can't be delegated." But Porter, along with other nationakl organizations, say there are several steps companiee can take to make the process less of a Before a company even starts looking for a third parthystorage vendor, it needs to figure out what information is vitap enough to be stored.
"Therde has to be a formalized collaborationbetweenb management, operations and any business partnerds involved," he said. "Don't expect it to be a quick It's going to take a lot of meetingse between a lotof divisions. Once a company figureas out what information needs to be kept Porter said it must decide how the information shoulsdbe stored. He explained that there are differing degrees of accesxs to the information fora business. For an insurance company would want recent claimsa to be more accessible than thosd made 10years ago.
Porter said that once this is a company can start looking for a storage He said the best place to startr searching is throughhis organization's directory, which he said is unbiased and neutral. Other trade organizations, such as Enterprise Contenft Management Association, also represent hundreds of storag vendors and make those listsavailablw online. Porter also recommends getting customer reviewd and making sure a vendor hasgood press. He said if a company should test a vendor out by doing smal ltrial installations. Porter explained that companies often use more thanone "Some vendors are better for storing long-terk information," he said.
"Otherds are better at giving youimmediatr access. You have to find the righty fit for each portion ofdata you're storing." To get the lowesft cost, Porter said many companies try to get severa l vendors into a bidding war. "But cost isn't the most importan t thing here," he said. "If something happened and you had to dependc onthe vendor's services to stay in business, the last thiny you'd want is to have compromisedd quality just so you saved some costs.
" When it comes to how far away a compant should electronically store its backup data, 15 miles used to be the rule of But after the widespread destruction of experts say information should be storerd in geographic regions that won't be affectedc by the same disaster. "Katrina not only increasedf awareness," Porter said. "It also rewrote a lot of the rulea we usedto have. It showed our industryh what needed tobe improved." One of those according to Porter, is how oftenb a company should test its backup plan. He explaine that many Katrina-affected companies had backup but discovered theywere out-of-date when the disastefr actually hit. "A business is constantly evolving," he said.
"And, consequently, so are your backuo needs." Porter said a compan should, with the assistance of its vendor, refresh its backul plan at least annually. He said many companieas actuallytest quarterly, dividinvg the process up into separate But Porter said the biggest mistake companies make, and one that Katrin highlighted, is that they focus too much on storage and not enoughh on recovery. "When you initially sit down you need to figurse out how fast you need to recover whensomethingh happens," he said. "You may back everything up but then it takes you 30 days to accesw it and be up and running again. Many companies can't survive that kind of delay.
" Computers, Technologu and Telecommunications