How to protect business critical data against fire

backuphard drive

We have 72 hard drives that contain our webcast inventory. The number is increasing. We're located in a frame building and we are afraid of not only fire, but catastrophic fire.

I've priced fireproof safes that hold to the required 125F for hard drives. Their price is through the roof.

Seems to me if we made backups of each of the hard drives and stored them off-site somewhere, or contracted with an online backup storage company, we might run up a bill buying backup drives that would approach the $7,000 cost of the safe!

What's the best way to protect our data from the risk of fire?

Best Answer

Well, first of all, you should always have an off-site copy of your data. Not just because there might be a fire, but what would you do in the event of a natural disaster, or similar event making your building inaccessible? Without a copy of your data off site, you're just hosed.

So, that said, there are two ways to have an off site copy of your data.

  1. Offsite Backups.

    • Typically you contract with a company like Cintas (the big name in that area I'm familiar with) to take your backup tapes to one of their facilities, but even something like having an employee take the daily backups home with him at the end of the day is better than nothing.

  2. A co-location facility of some sort.

    • Somewhere else that you have a server or servers to house your data, either a physical site, like a data center or a cloud service.

The advantage of #2 is that you can use it for #1 as well, in addition to the ability to have a business continuity plan in the case of a disaster. You can put in a backup system (hopefully in addition to the one you have at your main site), so you have off site backups, and if your main site goes down, you can run your services from the co-location site (often in a somewhat decreased capacity, if cost-savings are an issue).

Neither is particularly cheap, and may well exceed the price of a fireproof safe, but the advantages are that they provide something you can't get from a fireproof safe, which is protection against all types of data loss, whereas a fireproof safe only protects against fire.

The business case/cot justification for this is basically asking the question "what happens if we lose our data?" The answer is almost always that you go out of business, which makes it fairly easy to convince the people in charge of the need for a proper backup scheme and/or co-location facility. (And most places I've worked have had both, even if only because the techs pushed for them until they happened.)

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