All of this can create serious problems for a company’s computer infrastructure even if it is not directly affected by a disaster. North America’s aging power grid is  heavily taxed and even relatively minor weather events can cause power surges, brownouts and outages that will cause computer networks to crash, resulting in information loss.

Many companies have decided not to have their information backup in their geographic area, and are turning to cloud  disaster recovery, and backup strategies to mitigate the risk of computer infrastructure failure. When choosing a Cloud service provider make sure they have the  security,  power, and internet redundancies to ensure  the absolute safety  and retrieve ability of your companies information.

Click to learn more about our Cloud Backup services in Canada.

In conjunction with document retention, another issue is that of the security of storage media and how well electronic documents are protected for both current and future use. The five-year record retention requirement means that current technology must be able to support what was stored five years ago. Due to rapid changes in technology, some of today’s media might be outdated in the next three or five years. Audit data retained today may not be retrievable not because of data degradation, but because of obsolete equipment and storage media.

Section 802

Section 802 expects organizations to respond to questions on the management of SOX content. IT-related issues include policy and standards on record retention, protection and destruction, online storage, audit trails, integration with an enterprise repository, market technology, SOX software and more. In addition, organizations should be prepared to defend the quality of their records management program (RM); comprehensiveness of RM (i.e. paper, electronic, transactional communications, which includes emails, instant messages, and spreadsheets that are used to analyze financial results) , adequacy of retention life cycle, immutability of RM practices, audit trails and the accessibility and control of RM content

Section 404

Section 404 puts the onus on both the independent auditor and management to ensure that internal controls (including IT controls) are working.

• Independent auditors are required to attest to management’s assessment of its internal control over financial reporting. Due to this requirement, cycle rotation to test controls is no longer acceptable in public company audits.

• Auditors also have to test preventive and detective controls in order to obtain high levels of assurance about the operating effectiveness of internal controls.

• Management on the other hand must also provide their independent auditors with documentation, evidence of functioning controls and the documented results of testing procedures.

The unalterable nature of such information has caused the use of “write-once” or “compliance-edition” tape media to gain favor. Due to its record-only capability, another government regulation (SEC Rule 17a-4) requires the use of unalterable WORM (write-once read-many) storage media to retain records for seven years. This regulation applies to securities brokers and dealers, who have incorporated WORM into their storage environment.

It is important that the corporation can both rely on, and show auditors, that their documentation is authentic and up-to-date. This function is handled very well by most electronic document management systems. The use of check-in/check-out procedures creates a new record each time a document is created and subsequently modified, resulting in an acceptable audit trail. By addressing document control and authentication at the application level, companies that are non-SEC regulated can use any tape storage media to store information

Unfortunately, compliance to Sarbanes-Oxley may be an added cost to public corporations, with no major gain to their bottom line. Since all public companies must comply, there is no competitive advantage. Failure to comply is not an option. Therefore, it would be prudent for companies to budget carefully when implementing their compliance strategies to avoid noncompliance. In regard to data storage, the most cost-effective solution for compliance is the same solution as for all fixed and reference content: automated tape.

I have always found public speaking  at best to be stressful and at worst to be terrifying, however I did expect a tv interview, with the luxury of multiple takes,  on  online information backup  should be a snap for me. Not so, lol, I was just as nervous as I was for my very first speaking engagement.

I must thank and congratulate the film crew Business Day    sent as they were very good at making myself and the Computer Storage Services team feel at ease during the shoot.  In retrospect , although I never could be in movies, the day of shooting was quite enjoyable.

I hope you’ll enjoy the video below and if you would like to know how easy and cost effective it can be to back up your valuable data please give me a call at 1-888-368-1088.

Ian.

Is information storage a priority in your company?  Are you really protected well with your Offsite Backup solution?

Management within companies typically do not take an active role to ensure their information is secure.  They assume that the I.T. Department has that base covered, even though the I.T. Department may be under-budgeted, under-staffed, and not given the proper permissions to make information storage a priority.

Management may feel their mandate is to encourage and in some cases demand the IT department does more for less. The results can be disastrous. Following Managements mandate the IT department may base their hardware purchasing decisions on price. For example when purchasing hard drives usually the backbone of most companies information storage, manufacturers sell different qualities of drives based on anticipated usage. Purchasing  less expensive drives  initially may save money but can lead to unexpected crashes later costing the company thousands more in down time and recovery costs.

Management can also over estimate the reliability of their technology.  For example many companies think they do not require offsite backup because their servers store information on a RAID  (redundant array of independent disks) platform. With a raid 5 or greater platform if any single hard drive fails  there is no information loss as the total sum of the information is on the other 4 hard drives. In theory this is absolutely correct however in practice IT managers know if you have one drive failure on the same system you are likely to have more very soon or even in some cases at the same time.

Companies often over estimate the reliability of their onsite backup and most do not have an effective off site backup.  Disgruntled employees, lost passwords, software that can’t be found, power glitches, and temperature changes are just a few of the things that can cause serious information loss.

Companies often do not realize how vulnerable they are to human errors, staff changes, negligence intended or otherwise and company espionage. Management is often ill prepared for IT personnel changes, and not even aware of what passwords are, who has them, who can change them, how much information individuals have access to on and offsite. Most IT managers are not information back up specialists and may not be aware of what best practices should be implemented.

Computer Storage Services can provide analysis your current systems and procedures to help ensure effective information security and retrieval.

To learn more about how Computer Storage Services can help you with a reliable, cost effective onsite backup and cloud backup solution, custom designed for your specific needs, please give us a call at; 1-888-368-1088.

Computer Storage Services is providing a solution for companies using our Cloud backup services.

With the  premium service program we take a snapshot of your server or servers and load that snapshot onto servers at one of our back up facilities. Should you have a server crash we have a complete image of the server and can quickly restore your information to that server, usually within one hour. Access to the offsite restored server is provided through a preinstalled vpn (virtual private network) which is provided as part of our service. Total access  to the cloud server  can often be achieved within two hours of the onsite server going down.

The cost per server is typically between .50 to 1.00  per gb/month . For more information contact  Ian MacDonald 1-888-368-1088 x 11

The truth is online or cloud backup in most cases is a important component of the solution, not the whole solution. The major reason being is that any major file restore of more than 30 gb (often less) cannot be done in a timely manner over the internet. To restore a 30 gb plus drive over the internet typically takes many days or even weeks. If a server crashes this time frame is simply unacceptable for a company to be able to restore its information.

The solution is additional onsite redundant storage that should be provided and managed by online service provider. This of course adds to the cost however it is critically important for timely effective information backup.

With many online (cloud ) information backup companies it can take days to have a service ticket addressed to even start a online restore process, so Buyer Beware of Low Cost Cloud Backup Services.