Terrorism Sabotage and Your Data Backup Strategy

A Backup Article Contributed by Daniel Jones

Increasing Insecurity Effect Data Backup Plans

Since November 11th there has been a growing awareness that data backup plans built to avoid and recover from random mishap are probably not sufficient to defend against intentional disasters such as international terrorism, internal sabotage, or even destructive weather systems. Long gone are the times when your data backup could consist of a stack of tapes stored in a cabinet in the back of your server room. Even off site storage is no longer sufficient in its self.

Just because your data is stored safely across town doesn't protect you from a weather system that threatens your servers, could very well flood the warehouse storing your backups.

Data Backup Plans That Survive

The ultimate horror for a system administrator is the enemy within. No matter how thorough your backup plan is, an employee, ex-employee or malicious individual with access to inside information, can compromise it. If you are truly serious about protecting your mission critical backup data, there are steps you can take to minimize your exposure.

First of all, details of your data backup strategy should be considered proprietary information and not shared beyond those responsible for implementing the data backup, and their supervisors. Second, any sound backup solution should involve multiple backup methods to store backed up data in more then one location. Ideally each type of backup would be the responsibility of different people with each person having as limited as possible access to the other data backup.

Third you should take steps to not only have off site, but out of state storage for your backup data. This can often be achieved with one of the widely available online backup systems.

Data Backup Security, a Little Bit of Everything

Combining local data backups, with local offsite storage of data backup media, as well as outsourced online backups stored on multiple out of state servers, different people in charge of each method of data backup, and a policy of not disclosing details related to the backup plan, should serve to minimize your exposure to loss of mission critical data.