The gist of the case is that a disgruntled employee of Cyberlynk managed to log back into the Cyberlynk network after he was fired and proceeded to delete about 304GB of data which happened to include an entire season of the TV show called “Zodiac Island” produced by WeR1 network.

That is the ethics part of it, that a former employee was “wicked” enough to delete “…an accumulation of two years of work that included animation artwork and live action video production, with contributions from several hundred people and over three dozen companies in the United States and Asia”. Data he must have known were valuable to another entity who probably had nothing to do with his firing, or did they?

Ordinarily, this would not be a big issue because we will just assume that since this is a service provider, they can just restore the data from backup. Therein lies the “danger” part of the whole situation. Apparently, there were no reliable and complete backups because CyberLynk’s President Adam Hobach supposedly admitted that CyberLynk’s security and backup had failed and it could not recover all the data. Now that is a scary situation for business owners who rely solely on external providers to backup their critical data

Of the 304GB of data deleted, about 65GB was permanently lost, leaving the production company with only snippets of its 14-episode season. WeR1 argues that “[b]ecause this destroyed data includes fragments from each of the 14 episodes, it is now impossible to re-assemble any of the episodes in its entirety”.

My question is, where is the responsibility on the part of WeR1 in all of this? We were taught that “The Data Owner is always ultimately responsible” for their data. It is okay to “go after” a service provider for losing your files on their FTP server, but what happened to due diligence?

Was it too much for WeR1 to make local backups of its own data – given how cheap storage devices are these days? Is it reasonable to assume that there were no formal policies and implemented procedures that would ensure that critical assets were properly protected?

I think it is fair to expect more from a company with “…an accumulation of two years of work that included animation artwork and live action video production, with contributions from several hundred people and over three dozen companies in the United States and Asia”, instead of just relying on the promises of a service provider.

Sadly, WeR1 is representation of the state of many small businesses today, especially those who are “DIYers” and are too busy to follow up with external vendors on the state of their data. The cloud hype is admittedly on full assault mode with all kinds of promises of quick access to data, triple backups and 7 nines etc, but…that does not excuse negligence and laziness on the part of WeR1.

Although this was a case of files on an FTP server, the lesson from this , especially for small business owners, is to look before you leap into “cloud” services – where an external entity has your corporate data in their location whether it’s a web server, database server or just plain files. You have to be sure your “stuff” can be recovered is the servers of your providers go belly up, or a mischievous employee or ex-employee decide to try their hands at “hacking”.

As a small business owner with your data at a remote location, how many times have you asked for a test restore? Never? Well, maybe you should.

Business owners have a false sense of security when it comes to the issue of Business Continuity which is often thought of as just an IT (Information Technology) problem. “We have a good backup system so we are fine”. There is often the tendency to overlook flaws on business processes, application development, and logistics.

According to the Gartner Group, over fifty-percent of all businesses fail after experiencing a major disruption. In addition, lack of planning for these disruptions can cause a business to lose a majority of its customers and integrity.

Research has also shown that a business is more likely to recover if it has a plan and has taken into account all of the areas on which it depends to function normally especially since it is difficult to predict such failures.

As is well known, most computer hardware, if used consistently over a period of three to five years, stand a forty to sixty percent chance of having a catastrophic failure.  It is also a fact that most small businesses purchase non-brand computers, disregard repair policies (depending on the toss-and-replace mentality instead), and depend on these non-brand computers heavily. Most use inexpensive file servers (actually desktop computers converted to “servers”), or a cheap tape drive for backup. Backups are rarely tested to determine if a failed system can be rebuilt from scratch, and in many cases, the backups fail to restore critical data.

The question, “What if you had to leave your office within 30 seconds and could not come back for a month, if ever?” has been asked again and again.  The sad situation is that even with all the evidence supporting the urgency around this question, it remains answered with only a shrug. Business owners, who normally would not think twice about purchasing liability or health insurance, reply with a fatalistic, “I will deal with that if it happens.”

Business owners need to identify the risks that their businesses face, and make proactive plan to follow should the unexpected computer shutdown occur. By making computer problems “expected” and “planned for,” businesses will reduce the cost of data loss and recovery efforts.  The events of September 11th 2001, the ensuing Anthrax bio-terrorism scare, hurricanes Katrina and Rita, the incident with a small plane crashing into the IRS building in Austin, TX etc. gave “Business Continuity” new meaning. Although the probability of these events occurring again may be considered quite low, business owners should recognize the need for Business Continuity planning.

We understand that the typical small business has no IT department and in many cases may only have one person, or a contract with a service, that truly understands IT. For the most part, however, computers are treated like appliances in the sense that when something breaks, it is repaired or replaced.

Our goal as IT service providers should be to assist the small business owner in saving money and preserving wealth. We could do this by advising business owners on:

• Discovering what risks need to be avoided immediately.
• Closely examining processes, policies, and procedures to ensure requirements are met.
• Developing an awareness of what processes actually impact the business.
• Developing an appreciation of the business continuation plan as an integral part of the business plan.
• Helping you with a remote backup solution that backs up your critical data in real time, as it changes, to reduce the amount of time it takes to complete a data backup for as little as $20 a month.
• Simple operating system imaging techniques that reduces the time it takes to bring a system back online and operations following a system failure
• Working with vendors with whom you can pre-arrange replacement hardware should your fail.
• Simple techniques to follow to make sure you have continuous access to your data even when your computers are not available.

One thing that is not common in small business environments is process automation. Most processes are manually carried out. What we have to realize is that as hard as we try, at some point, somebody forgets to run a system scan or the backup program. Occasionally, someone could accidentally turn off or stop a backup application before the process is completed.
In many small business environments, only one employee is in charge of I.T. support, system maintenance and running backups. If that employee goes on vacation or stays home sick one day, the backups will not run.
It is very difficult for a small business owner to rely solely on human effort to keep computer systems of the business safe.
The best practice is to strive for automation in order to have consistent, reliable updates to your security software and backup systems. There is also the need for processes to run independent of any particular individual.
If you re a business owner, or you are in charge of running updates and performing regular maintenance, automation free up untold amounts of time and spare endless headaches. Automatic updates, backups and system scans, deployed system-wide, ensure that your whole business stays safe and up-to-date no matter who is in the office and who remembers to do what

• Faster backup technology.
• Simplified restoration.
• Simplified recovery of your operating system.
• Ability to recover applications.
• Improved scheduling.
• Offsite removal of backups for disaster protection.
• Remote administration.
• Automatic disk usage management.
• Extensive command-line support.
• Support for optical media drives and removable media.

The part I have a problem with is Microsoft’s claim that “the design makes it especially well-suited for smaller organizations or individuals who are not IT professionals”. No, the old NTBackup was well suited for smaller organizations and everyone else, as a matter of fact, because it provided something we all cherish: CHOICE. With the old software, you had a choice of backup locations. You had a choice of whether you wanted to backup an entire disk or a single file. You had a choice of backing up to tape, external devices, internal drives or network drives. You could even backup up to a floppy drive for crying out loud. It was less expensive.

The new Windows Backup system will be an expensive and even dangerous experience for the small business owner without an IT person on staff. If a non-IT person had to deal with what I just experienced, there are going to be a lot of calls for data recovery because of hosed drives and lost data. The reason is that if you get hypnotized by the “Wizard” and just click through the backup process, you may end up reformatting a non-system drive with critical data. I know this because I tried it. I plugged in an external drive with test data and clicked through the wizard. It reformatted the external drive before creating the backup.

The latest iteration of Windows Backup is another example of the constant argument that Microsoft sometimes has a tendency of wanting to think for the consumer. Having been around this long, we expect more from the software giant. I have a suspicion that backup software vendors had a hand in the creation of this product. With the old software, I had no compelling reason to buy expensive solutions from third party vendors. It just worked. Backup was simple and restoration was the easiest you can imagine: locate your backup file, restore to your preferred location, done.

This latest disappointment came about because I was at a location the other day and we had just finished installing SBS 2008. The client had a Line of Business application with a database of about 100MB so I wanted to set up a nightly schedule to backup that one file. Never happened. It turned out that there was no option to backup single files. I either had to reformat a 1TB external drive to accomplish that goal, or backup the entire disk content totalling about 150GB. All because Microsoft got infatuated with a technology called VDI.