A research study by The University of Texas found that 94% of companies suffering from catastrophic data loss do not survive – 43% never reopen and 51% close within two years.
How do you avoid catastrophic data loss? Or better yet, how do you set yourself up for success even if a catastrophic event occurs? It’s all about monitoring and maintenance.
A small business owner recently reached out to the Codistas team to help with managing data. This business generates significant amounts of data every year – around 60TB per year, and their current data storage solution – a mixture of hosted FTP server, multiple cloud storage locations, and a new low grade NAS unit every year – could not keep up with day-to-day operations. There was also no process for backing up or archiving data. The lack of data management put the business at risk – if one of the low-grade NAS units fail, the business operation would stop.
Our team went ahead and performed a routine business and technical analysis then architected a solution. The solution incorporated a basic data lifecycle management process – the data would move through different storage tiers and systems as it ages, and ultimately to a long-term archival location. Production data storage would be hosted by real-time replicated storage systems utilizing their current NASes and include daily backups.
As part of any good system, monitoring and maintenance was incorporated into the solution. The Codistas team would monitor the storage systems, as well as power and networking with our enterprise grade remote monitoring system. One Codistas staff member would also visit the site at least once a month to check and maintain.
In an effort to save on cost, the business owner wanted to purchase a bigger capacity NAS unit which would hold all the data instead of paying for monitoring and maintenance.
The challenge here is by placing all data into a bigger NAS unit, you not only increase the risk of data loss, it also makes the data loss more catastrophic when there is a system failure. From a cost perspective, paying for one large NAS unit is actually equal to three year’s worth of monitoring and maintenance without any backup.
This is a common instance with too much emphasis on hardware. Many small business owners would spend the money to buy brand new hardware without considering any spend on monitoring and maintenance.
A good quality hardware is only a starting point. The solution design, post deployment maintenance, and systems monitoring must have at least the same importance if not more as hardware. And this is especially true when budgeting for IT spend.
What’s the risk of not including monitoring and maintenance?
Let’s think about what would happen if we went ahead and deployed the proposed solution without the monitoring and maintenance portion. Say six months down the road, a hurricane hits Houston. The office is flooded. All on-premise equipment is now under water. The business owner calls us frantically asking for help to restore the offsite backup. That is when we realize the offsite backup has not been working for months because they forgot to pay the cloud storage vendor. In this scenario, does the six-month-old NAS unit help? Not at all. But a well implemented monitoring and maintenance system would have caught the offsite backup issue the moment it happened, and IT staff would be able to correct it then.
Monitoring and maintenance should also extend beyond just storage. A proper IT environment should include monitoring and maintenance on all components – computer, network, virtualization, directory systems, application service, and security service. It is the only way to ensure systems are performing optimally. The risk of skipping this component is simply too high for any business to take.
Do yourself and your business a favor by considering a monitoring and maintenance package. Cost is typically similar as a new hardware purchase, and your risk for data loss is much lower.
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