Aren't laptops fantastic? All of a sudden, you can work wherever and whenever you want, unconstrained by wires or modem cables or any of the paraphernalia traditionally associated with a PC, and you can even have access to every file you would if you were stuck in the office. Without my laptop I would be lost.....
.... and then I was! Or rather my laptop was. It was ridiculous really, I only stopped for a second on the platform at York Station to check my phone (another piece of technology I can't live without) and when I looked down, it was gone. My heart sank. Not just because my Compaq Evo N800w is my newest toy, but because of all the information that was stored on it. Confidential facts and figures, every e-mail I've sent and received in the past 3 months and documents I'd been lovingly adding to for many an evening. Every single bit of it was on the hard drive of that laptop.
Anyway, incident reported, I boarded a slightly later train to London and twiddled my thumbs for 2 hours feeling bereft without my trusty technology partner, and wondering just how many other companies are making contingencies for protecting the data held on laptops, like we have at Plum. Of course your laptops will be insured to the hilt, but you still can't insure the value of information.
Maybe you also have "shuttle" workers: those who use a desktop PC in the office, but gamely arm themselves with a laptop on the odd visit to client sites or when they need to work from home. All of a sudden, information is split over different devices and employees can't be expected to be as scrupulous as they should be about backing up important files or making sure they have the latest versions at their fingertips.
According to technology research and analysis group IDC, as much as 60% of a company's intellectual capital is outside the safety zone of a managed network server. Most data can be found only on local machines, and most often that data has no professional backup mechanism to protect it. That's a terrifying statistic when you think how easily such crucial information could be lost through malfunction, theft, natural disaster, or any number of scenarios. I know somebody who reversed over his laptop in his haste to catch an early morning flight - certainly made a change from the sound of gravel crunching under his tyres!
So, just what can you do about keeping data held on laptops secure?
In the old days, when everyone was in the office with computer firmly bound to their desk, eager faces hidden behind huge monitors, your Network Administrator would have run regular backups which copied all the data held on your local machine to a central server. This was known as a full-system backup.
However, the sheer amount of data which a person now creates on a day to day basis has made it impractical for all data to be backed up every day, and so most organizations now just back up data which has changed since the last backup. This is known as an incremental backup, and is essential for organizations which need to keep their backup window to a minimum. The data might be held on disk, or on tape, possibly on or off-site, and acts as a copy which can take you back to a certain point in time should you ever need to restore all or part of your systems. By the way, backups are the easy bit - it's the time it takes most organizations to restore which is the painful bit. I would strongly recommend you run a planned disaster scenario so that should the worst happen, your policies and procedures are in place.
This new incremental backup technology, whereby your software actually recognises which is new information, and which it has already backed up on a previous occasion, has meant that now laptops can be protected and files synchronised, with minimal user effort. By installing software (VERITAS NetBackup or VERITAS BackupExec are probably the market leaders at the moment) you can have disk-based backup protection from any location, and file synchronisation between desktops and laptops. If the user makes a change to a file when not connected to the network, the file is stored in a local cache and as soon as the user reconnects, these changes are immediately transferred to the file server or network share and backed up as normal. Like most software, this operates on a licence basis, and the more laptops you have, the cheaper it is.
For users who are on the network, their changes are continuously protected. They don't need to worry about missing a scheduled backup, which used to be a big problem when backups were just done once a day (or less frequently). Another welcome addition is that your IT department can now protect the company from data loss without additional hardware, staff and expense.
Mobile technology is an amazing thing, so should the worst happen - you turn round and your laptop's gone - there are ways of making sure that your data won't have disappeared too.
www.plumdata.co.uk
