New/old ideas - part 1

The more things change, the more they stay the same I'm told.

I started a new job in November, and my primary objective when walking in the door is to secure the business, whatever part of it I'm responsible for.

Now anyone in IT, especially in management, will immediately think of backups and disaster recovery (DR) in the same thought (don't have breaths in my mind...)

Backups and DR go together for IT - ALWAYS. Usually you can't have one without the other. The DR plan is more complex and business encompassing, but without a form of backup, there is nothing to recover in this day and age - try running your business during a powercut these days. No computers, no service - simple. You can tell I come from an IT-centric world (similar to ego-centric I guess).

So, we have our backups which are basically all the data, but that's not enough. You need backups at different levels. As an example, if you have a complete wipeout of your facility, you will acquire new servers, backup devices (for restoring of course) and workstations. The servers typically come with no operating system, so how do you rebuild them?

Not off the backup.

Either you buy a new copy of Windows Server and install from scratch and then start restoring, or you have a copy somewhere. Now you could store all your software in an off-site location, but in this day and age why have books or boxes of CDs/DVDs when you can rip the images and dump them on a memory stick. 16Gb is quite cheap these days and they come in 64Gb versions now as well.

So that's what we did. And we have 4 of them, each a copy of the other left with key company officers for THAT day, may it NEVER come.

But just in case...