Data - no longer an organisation's biggest liability

Organisations have invested vast amounts of money and resources attempting to protect their company data and, until recently, the "server backup" system has been relatively effective and acceptable.

However, this dated approach is unable to incorporate the ever-increasing perimeter, and with today's corporate governance requirements, these outdated methods are falling horribly short.

Organisations have been investing in a technology or methodology that is at best addressing only half of the problem. About 60% to 80% of company data resides on the desktops and laptops and very little of that data is being protected or backed up.

Most organisations will have some sort of policy which states it is the user's responsibility to work off a server and back up the data on their desktops and/or a server. These policies are outdated and irresponsible; the organisation should be responsible for company data. Indeed, in terms of the American Sarbanes-Oxley Act, which incorporates corporate governance requirements, the chief information officer is now personally liable for company data.

Storage costs can also be a drain on resources. Usually the manual policy has no compression system and, if archiving is required, a full copy of the user's data has to be saved everyday. A huge amount of disk space is needed for this, and the problem is exacerbated when there is no policy enforcement and therefore no way to restrict users from copying movies and music onto the server, resulting in the majority of disk space is being consumed by data not related to work at all.

Disaster recovery procedures are massively expensive and are often unsuccessful. Tape backups are not user friendly and are often unreliable; this results in an expensive time-wasting exercise with only a very small success rate. And if the user failed to copy his data onto the central server, recovery of that data is impossible.

Organisations are also unable to pull any sort of report which will inform them as to how many employees are policy-compliant. This is already a pressing issue as they strive to meet corporate governance requirements.

Companies can address these ever-increasing problems with the Cibecs Continuity Server. With the implementation of Cibecs, all corporate governance requirements will be met, there will be huge time and money savings and valuable company data will be protected.

Cibecs will:

* Ensure automated backups on desktops and laptops occur with no user intervention required;
* Ensure all backup policies are enforced and policies can be centrally configured and deployed. This will ensure only company data is being backed up and encrypted. No longer will the company infrastructure be wasted due to employees copying personal data onto the servers;
* Compress all backups. Daily backups are also reduced enormously by means of binary patches which back up only new and changed files, thus saving massive amounts of disk space;
* Ensure the organisation has full archiving, as well as assist in corporate governance requirements. This will also assist the organisation in tracking trends and allow better visibility into the past, which is always useful when addressing the present; and
* Ensure organisations will save significantly on data migration or disaster recovery. No longer will data migration be a time-consuming practice, nor will disaster recovery be a huge headache. These once inconvenient and stressful situations will now be made simple and extremely efficient.