Business continuity in SMB: disaster recovery in the small-to-medium business space*

Many small to medium businesses (SMB) operate under the data protection philosophy of “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” But something will inevitably happen: a disaster wipes out the backup tapes, or a critical database is permanently corrupted, or months of backups are useless because there was never an actual backup–only an error that repeated every night but no one ever knew until it was too late. All too often, the consequences are disastrous for the business.

It’s not that SMB doesn’t know they need reliable backups and data protection. The issue is that SMBs are not flush with IT headcount looking for things to do. Unlike the enterprise, where simplification can threaten IT specialists’ jobs, mid-market IT people are so severely overworked that they’ll look for any good excuse to take tasks off their plate. They may need enterprise-level data protection–reliable backup and archiving, snapshots, replication, and SANs–but products need to be cost-effective and simple to deploy and maintain. Storage vendors into this space cannot overstress the importance of simplification in this space.

What SMB Needs Now

The three main needs for SMB and data protection are to make sure the backups work and are reliably moved offsite, and that these operations are simple and cost-effective. Donald Mead, VP of Marketing for FalconStor said, “The SMBS want the same level of storage management as the enterprise–and they need them.”

Typical Challenges

* Little or no IT support staff. Wrote Steven Pofcher, Senior Marketing Manager at Maxell, “Smaller businesses face the same fundamental backup and data protection concerns as large businesses: What is the most cost-effective method to reliably protect and recover business-critical information? For many small businesses, the problem is even more difficult because they do not have an IT staff to design, deploy and manage data storage backup and recovery systems.”

* Unreliable backups. It’s not uncommon for an SMB to go for months without a successful backup, and they don’t realize it until they need to get that data back–and they can’t. SMB is busy worrying about their business, not their backups, but the outcome can be disastrous.

* Complicated administration. With a dearth of IT support staff, the last thing SMB needs is a complicated backup routine, or one that requires many manual steps. SMB largely wants to “set and forget,” but up until now has lacked products to do that.

* Dearth of value-added storage services. SMB doesn’t only need reliable backup. They also need reliable recovery, snapshot technology, availability and a workable method of sending backups off-site. The enterprise has access to any number of supporting products, but they have generally been too complex and/or expensive to make a big dent in the SMB market. According to Peter Carroll, CTO of Acpana Business Systems, that may be changing. “Owners are focused on backup and recovery, but there’s a lot more out there that they could really use.”

* Run-ins with disaster. A number of storage vendors have reported that natural disasters in 2005 have seemed to cause an uptick in storage purchases, especially backup and recovery software and the need for offsite storage. This is a good thing–if a business is down for just 10 days or more, the likelihood that they’ll come back is remote.

*Courtesy goes to The Free Library