CPD Solutions wrapped up a highly successful 2016 culminating with the QLD seminar held on Thursday 24th November in Logan. Andre Chevallier-Knospe, Director of Visual Approvals was delighted to speak to the course attendees regarding the adoption of technology in the certification industry. However, after experiencing an incident earlier in the week, Andre changed the focus of his presentation to a subject extremely relevant to everyone in the digital world…….System Backups to the Cloud!
Following is a transcript of Andre’s presentation:
I had planned talk to you today about adoption of technology in the certification industry. This was only going to be a very brief talk. But in a light of some events that occurred to me over the last week I am going to digress slightly from this topic. Those events relate to a failure of a hard drive on m
I would like to ask you guys how any all of you back up each day your computer systems. Can I ask you how many of you have backup each day your computer systems? And how often you test those backups once a month? Once a year? Every Thursday night!
The reason I'm asking those questions is: I thought I was completely immune to data or computer failure. I had the arrogance to think that I was infallible. It turned out that I came down to work and turned my computer on went up and got a cup of coffee came back down and noticed that my screen wasn't responding. I thought no big deal I just restarted the computer. When I restarted the computer, there was nothing there. It would not restart. I thought oh, OK. How does that happen?
How can I actually experience a hardware failure? How is that possible? The world is unfair!
Anyway…. It happened. These drives I use in my computer systems are supposed to be guaranteed ten years against failure. That doesn't mean they don't fail it just means that I get another drive for nothing. Anyway, I then hunted off and looked for my backups which I knew I had. But in the anxiety of my experience. I couldn't find them.
To cut a long story short after a lot of angst and working out that would take me three days to rebuild the machine, I actually did find the backups. I instigated the backup restore and it took two and a half hours to restore almost seven hundred gigabytes of data.
The reason I'm bringing it up today, is that it impressed upon me the need to check out some of the VA client sites and see what sort of backup solutions they have and how often those backups are in fact tested. It turns out that all of the sites I checked, they did have backup drives and, yes those drives were taken offsite every night.
However, they didn't check to see whether the backups were actually current and in some cases those drives were full. They were full anywhere up to three months ago, therefore no more back-ups could fit on the drive. But the client was under the impression that it was backed up, there was no problem. If the client had been the subject to a crypto virus or a hardware failure, the earliest amount of work that they could recover would be three months ago! That would be catastrophic to some businesses!
This brings me to the real reason for my talk today. Visual Approvals can offer a solution to customers in an off-site manner that allows you to test your backup every single day. It's affordable it comes in to the tune of around about $75 per a month if you have less than one terabyte of storage. The additional benefit is that if your hardware system falls victim to a crypto virus or you experience a hardware failure, you can actually launch that system in the cloud. You will be able to continue working within fifteen minutes. It now means essentially that you no longer need to take pieces of hardware offsite. It's an automated process that just simply backs up to the cloud.
You will of course need a full time internet connection, but that will give you a full solution to your to back-up scenarios. We've tested this against files upwards of five and six terabytes in storage. I was able to mount and launch those systems within twenty minutes of a failure. We can test a backup at any point in time. Not once a month. Not once a week. Not once a day. We can test it every minute if we want to, to check whether it's actually backing up properly.
Actually I might mention one other thing if I may. A few years ago a Visual Approvals client suffered a small fire in their premises. It was a very small fire, the air conditioner in the front office caught fire. The fire did not spread to the remainder of the office, it just did a small flash over to the opposing wall and peetered itself out. However there was some smoke damage through the building.
That client was under the impression that the backups were being taken off site each night, but no they weren’t. What happened was the smoke that went through that building deposited itself on the motherboard of each of the computers. As we know, smoke is a conductive material. Two of the computers were started and one of them blew a power supply when it started. It effectively meant that the client lost the complete use of their entire computer systems for two weeks.
The reason for that was…. the motherboards of the computers needed to be washed. The point I'm trying to make here is if they had a backup solution that was affordable and mounted in the cloud, it would have been possible for any member of their staff to log in within a few minutes and continue working.
That's the beauty of cloud backup solutions.
In Summary…
Up until now some of those solutions have been hideously expensive. I know some clients pay in the vicinity of $1500 to maybe even $2000 a month for an off-site solution. Our cloud backup solution is so cost effective and now
within the reach of most certification companies. If you have less than a one terabyte backup in the cloud you're looking around $75 per month with instant recovery.
Thanks guys.
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