By John P. Mello Jr.
The dreaded exclamation “System’s down!” has become more than just an utterance of inconvenience. These days, it can be a corporate death sentence. And that’s no exaggeration. A study by the National Archives and Records Administration in Washington, D.C., reported that nearly half of businesses that experience catastrophic data loss fail immediately. It also revealed that, among businesses that suffer a data loss of 10 days or more, 93 percent go bankrupt within a year of the incident.
So it’s no wonder that business is booming at SafeData in Warwick. The company provides remote-hosted business continuity services for clients such as Calvin Klein, Ocean State Job Lot, Quaker Fabric, Symmons Industries, Foster Grant, Sennheiser and Wachovia.
Peter Briggs, president of SafeData, spoke with Providence Business News about the importance of protecting one’s data and having a dependable, nimble backup system.
PBN: Why can data loss be so devastating to a business today?
BRIGGS: A business’s data is one of its most critical assets, aside from inventory and people. Without that information for any extended period of time, a company is in jeopardy. That’s why data protection, secure access to data and rapid recovery of data have become hot topics in the information technology field.
If you’re a retailer or just a company that needs to constantly perform transactions, every minute, every hour, every day, you’re down costs money because customers can’t place orders. For most of our customers, if they were to lose access to their systems for more than a few days, many companies would not survive.
If you went to Home Depot and the cash register didn’t work, you’d go someplace else. If you go to L.L. Bean on the Web and the system is unavailable, you’d go to a competitor. It’s more than disaster recovery. It’s availability of data, so companies can maintain a competitive edge.
PBN: What impact have government compliance requirements had on the data-storage business?
BRIGGS: Businesses have to have some kind of data-recovery plan. And they have to report that to their board and shareholders. Most boards and shareholders won’t tolerate a business interruption for more than a short period of time.
Many of these data-restoration issues aren’t caused by disasters. They’re just caused by system failure. Very few failures are due to something like a hurricane. Systems fail all the time, though, because of general failures. Things break.
PBN: How do you protect a client’s data?
BRIGGS: We use different types of technology. At the highest level, we have instantaneous system mirroring, off-site. So if you lost your system in Providence, I could have you back online in five minutes from our data center in Medford [Mass.].
If you have a 24/7 operation with locations around the world, you can’t shut the system down to do backups and planned maintenance. We provide a system mirror off-site, so if you need to switch to it and continue to run the business, you can do so.
PBN: What makes your service attractive to small and medium-size businesses?
BRIGGS: We buy large systems and leverage what’s called “logical partitioning.” We essentially take large systems and slice and dice them into smaller virtual systems. We can deliver solutions to those businesses for less than they can do it themselves. If they had to do it themselves, they’d have to buy the software, buy the hardware, find a location to put the system in. You add all those costs up, and we’re a lot less money.
PBN: You’re backing up data to hard disks. In the past, backup systems were based on tape. Do companies still use tape backups?
BRIGGS: Just about everybody still uses tape. That’s why this business space is hot and why we’re growing so fast. We have a unique niche. We don’t sell you any hardware or software. It’s like getting cable TV: you turn on the service and you pay us monthly.
Most companies back up to tape and store the tapes off site. The problem with that scenario is, if your system craps out, it takes a long, long time to restore a system from tape.
And a lot of time, tapes don’t work. You’d be surprised. In a lot of companies, the CFO takes the tapes home and puts them in a cardboard box in his basement. I’m not kidding. I’ve seen that done in $200 million companies.
PBN: You have two data centers in close geographic proximity. If a catastrophic event like the Northeast blackout occurred, wouldn’t your customers’ business continuity be at risk?
BRIGGS: Our data center in Medford can run off the grid for 30 days. It has six generators in it.
PBN: What trends do you see developing in your industry during the next five years?
BRIGGS: More and more companies will be using a service for data backup, as opposed to a build-it-yourself approach. Build-it-yourself requires IT management. Most IT staff are overworked, so things like security and data protection get put on a back burner. So more and more people are going to be interested in a service.
