Sean Kinney, Vice President of Cloud Services at Acronis was kind enough to take the time to answer some questions about backup and recovery, information security, cloud computing, and online and offline backup protection.
Thanks to Sean Kinney from Acronis for his very informative answers. Thanks as well to Norman Birnbach, President of Birnbach Communications, Inc. for facilitating this interview and for his generous input into formulating the interview questions.
What exactly do you mean by backup and recovery and why should it be important to everyone in business?
Sean Kinney: Backup and recovery is the IT term for backing up and protecting your business critical information in the event that something goes wrong – either you have a hardware failure, data corruption, accidental deletion, theft or disaster--- and being able to recover those systems or assets after a disaster.
There are many ways to implement a company backup and recovery strategy but they essentially come down to: How much is your down time costing your organization, how important is it to recover your systems and data, how fast do you need to recover and can you afford to lose any of your data.
What's the difference to users of online backup and off-premise backup?
Sean Kinney: Online backup is a subset of off-premise backup. Off-premise backup is any copy of your information that is stored at another location, away from the primary business address.
For years, businesses shipped hundreds of tapes in boxes on trucks to other locations. Unfortunately, tape, like an old cassette tape, is prone to failure and being unreadable when the business actually needs to access the information on the tape.
Online backup is a similar process, but it transmits the data over a secure internet connection from your primary business address to another remote location and the information is stored on highly reliable disk drives. Online backup data is encrypted so it cannot be accessed by others.
Many tape based off-premise backups are not encrypted and when the truck has an accident or a tape gets lost, the company has to disclose this potential identity exposure to its customers.
What are the choices companies can make about how to back up their systems?
Sean Kinney: Businesses have a few options and usually implement multiple protection schemes depending on the application and its importance:
(A) Data Replication – They can replicate their data to another machine and have it ready and waiting at all times. This machine can either be nearby in the data center or at another location altogether. When something bad happens, they switch their systems to the secondary copy and are up and running. This is the quickest resumption of business and the most expensive. Think about what would happen if the New York Stock Exchange shut down even for a few seconds? They use remote replication. This is a costly solution that requires duplicate server systems to be maintained.
(B) Local backup – users can have additional copies of their information at their primary location on portable drives, disc, or hard drives. Recovery can be fast. But if there is a problem at the primary location, this local backup may be affected too. Example, in the event of a flood, both the primary and backup could be affected.
(C) Offsite backup – users can have additional copies of their information at a remote location. They ship their data physically to another location (the old way) or securely over the internet or dedicated bandwidth connection. This protects users from theft or a disaster. Recovery time can be longer due to the distance.
Businesses should define their needs and then implement a combination of A, B and C. Most businesses combine both local and offsite data protection.
Sean Kinney (photo left)
We've heard the term business continuity quite a bit, and of course, disaster recovery. But can you tell us a little bit more about these concepts, and how technology is evolving to better address the challenges of crises, natural disasters, system failures, virus attacks and the like?
Sean Kinney: Business Continuity refers to those activities performed daily to maintain service, consistency, and recoverability. The foundation of Business Continuity are the policies, guidelines, standards, and procedures implemented by an organization.
Business continuity is the activity performed by an organization to ensure that critical business functions will be available to customers, suppliers, regulators, and other entities that must have access to those functions.
These activities include many daily chores such as project management, system backups, change control, and help desk. Business Continuity is not something implemented at the time of a disaster.
Business continuity is sometimes confused with disaster recovery, but they are separate entities.
Disaster recovery is the process an organization needs to go through to recover a system, data, or combination of the two.
Is backup and recovery the same thing as security and antivirus?
Sean Kinney: No – they are different because they protect users from different things. Backup and recovery protects the data from intended and unintended incidents. Security and anti-virus programs protect the data from malicious attacks, intrusions and cyberthefts.
We've heard a lot about cloud computing and some vendors say that having online backup is more important or better than local backup. What are your thoughts on using the cloud (what is the cloud, anyway) and is one form of backup better than the other?
Sean Kinney: Cloud computing is the ability to access raw computing resources, CPU and storage on demand, remotely. It is like electricity, you pay for what you use and you expect it to always be there when you need it. Online backup is more than cloud computing, it is a cloud service. Online backup is a software application that works in the cloud, combining both compute resources and software functionality.
For local vs. online backup - each has its advantages. The user should ideally have both. Local backup provides for a fast recovery, so it helps with you need to recover an entire system, including the operating system. Online backup has the advantage that it protects you against theft and disaster. An added benefit it that you never need to worry about upgrades or hardware compatibility. Your online service vendor takes care of everything. If you can only choose one, you are looking for simplicity and can accept a potential slower recovery time, then yes, online backup is the way to go.
Can you give some customer scenarios where backup and recovery contributes to business productivity?
Sean Kinney: When data is corrupt or inaccessible, business productivity stops. What would happen if your Outlook was malfunctioning, your online storefront was unavailable to customers or your customer support system was not functioning? With a backup and recovery process, this downtime could be reduced to minutes instead of hours or days.
To give you a scenario:
A business has their CRM software on an aging Windows server. Since this is critical server for the business, the IT manager has been backing up every night and any time the data is drastically changed.
The hard drive starts to clunk and hiss.
Luckily, he heard the disk making noises the day before and ordered a replacement disk. After the next backup, he’ll change the disk out and use the Acronis boot media to boot into the Acronis loader and restore the backup image onto the new hard drive.
If he hadn’t heard the hiss and clunks of the hard drive and the drive did fail, every minute without that system with the CRM software installed effects the business.
Using Acronis’ Universal Restore, the IT manager could take the last good backup and deploy the image to a different hardware, thus restoring the system in a few minutes.
Without backups, then this could have been a complete disaster for the business and resulted in hours, days or weeks to get the mission critical system back up.
What's the Return on Investment (ROI) of backup and recovery products?
Sean Kinney: IT professionals and salespeople have been trying to calculate this number for decades, usually to justify large hardware and software purchases. It is a calculation of lost revenue, employee productivity and customer satisfaction per minute or per hour against the cost of the software and the people to manage the backup process.
What are some best practices you have learned by using your own backup and recovery products every day?
Sean Kinney: Best practice is to start with the business requirement and needs first, then consider the technology solution. For example, can you afford to have your systems unavailable for: 1 minute, 1 hour or 1 day? Once you determine how quickly you need to recover, then you can spend the appropriate amount on the backup and recovery process. One size does not fit all within a business. Some applications can only be down for a few seconds before impacting business, while other less critical ones can be often for 1 day or more.
Next – build a consistent, automated process for your backup and recovery. Backups should occur at a minimum of once per day.
Finally, test the recovery function and the person executing the recovery. Don’t wait until you need to restore your systems to test them. Firemen practice for when there is a real fire, you should do the same.
For companies seriously considering backup and recovery solutions, what are the three key things they should look for?
Sean Kinney: You want flexibility, which I define as the ability to have local and online backups from the same application. It also means having a backup schedule that does not impact your primary business operations. Keep it simple and all in one application or service. For example, you may want local backups of your servers and online backups for your remote or traveling employees. You should be able to manage everything from one application. Your business requirements will evolve over time, make sure your backup system can evolve with you.
For online services, make sure you choose a known company. They have your information, like your financial institution protects your assets, make sure you know who they are and how long they have been in business. Data encryption is critical, if they don’t have it, you should not buy it.
Finally, Make sure the complexity, level of functionality and ultimately cost, match their needs and size of business. A 10 person company needs a much simpler solution than a 100,000 multi-national.
How expensive is it to use backup and recovery software?
Sean Kinney: There is no simple answer here. It depends on the size of the business and the relative cost of reducing downtime.
Who is the ideal customer to use backup and recovery software?
Sean Kinney: Business runs on information. If you lose or cannot access your information, you are or will be out of business. Every business needs data protection and backup and recovery. It is the ultimate horizontal application across industries, like payroll is.
What are the trends you see for backup and recovery in 2010? Are there any surprising trends this year that were unexpected in 2009?
Sean Kinney: Trends in 2010: With bandwidth becoming less expensive and faster combined with an increased business comfort using online services in general, I expect the adoption of online backup to accelerate. This is both in replacement of traditional offsite tape implementations and net-new customers adopting backup and recovery for the first time.
For 2009, it still surprises and scares me how many businesses are unaware of the need for backup and recovery and how many are one system failure away from going out of business.
What is next for Acronis in 2010?
Sean Kinney: Traditionally, Acronis has been a software company. Our expertise and differentiations in the marketplace is in data protection and disaster recovery software. We are now offering this functionality as a cloud service model. Customers want choice in how they consume software functionality – either as a traditional software application or as an online cloud service, Acronis will give it to them.
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Acronis is a leading provider of onsite and offsite backup, disaster recovery and security solutions. Its patented disk imaging and management technology enables corporations and individuals to protect digital assets in physical and virtual environments. With Acronis' backup, recovery, server consolidation and virtualization migration software, users protect their digital information, maintain business continuity and reduce downtime. Acronis software is sold in more than 180 countries and available in 13 languages. For additional information, please visit www.acronis.com/ Follow Acronis on Twitter: @acronis.
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