Johannesburg, 16 Apr 2015
When the power disappears, your critical data shouldn't. With load shedding a reality in South Africa, businesses are at a high risk of damaged hardware, data corruption and hardware failure caused by blackouts, power surges and inconsistent power supply.
"Securing your business' data is not easy and it takes expertise," says Tony Holmes, CEO of Backup Storage Facilities (BSF), leader in providing an effective professional solution for secure, safe and confidential off-site data backup storage.
"While load shedding itself does not directly affect one's PC and its hard drives - as most people have backups on their computers and laptops, and alternative lines to power supplies - sudden power surges pose a real danger to hardware failure. Power surges occur when the flow of electricity is interrupted, then started again, or when something sends electricity flowing back into the system. Large power surges have been known to literally fry circuits and blow motherboards, while low-level power surges can cause 'electronic rust', gradually degrading internal circuitry until it ultimately fails.
"In addition to power surges, businesses are at a continued risk of losing thousands of rands worth of data to other disasters like fire, flooding, lightning, theft, viruses, equipment failure, and even simple operator mistakes. With studies showing that nearly half of companies that lose their data in a disaster never recover, companies need to have a backup storage in place that affords total peace of mind."
Holmes explains that while there are various backup options available one of the best storage solutions for critical data is media tape storage.
"Some companies choose to backup to an external hard drive, flash disk, CD or DVD, or to one of the numerous cloud backup solutions such as Dropbox, Google Drive, i-Drive, Bitcasa, SkyDrive, among many others.
"The biggest problem, however, with these backup solutions is that they are still power dependent. Data backed up using tape storage can never be affected by load shedding, because this is a power independent method of storage. Instead of having to run a restore from the satellite vault, data that has been corrupted or lost can be replaced in just hours, less than two if you're with BSF. BSF offers a 90-minute turnaround time for delivery of storage tapes.
"With tape backups in hand, businesses can retrieve the last backup (normally the day before) so only the current daily data will be lost."
When choosing who to entrust your media tape storage to, Holmes recommends identifying a company that not only provides a turnkey solution for data backup, but one that adheres to strict safety and confidentiality standards.
"Look for a company that has protocol and security in place, otherwise you might find yourself a victim of sabotage or data theft," says Holmes.
"BSF, for example, conforms to the highest data safety standards worldwide. Our buildings and vehicles are unmarked and we don't publish details about our stores anywhere to protect our clients. Data is transported and stored in insulated steel canisters and locked in a vault. Each canister is assigned a unique identification code only the client has access to, to further ensure the protection of valuable data."
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