Acronis Backup & Recovery 11: Simple protection for complex problems

David Heath
Wednesday, 22 June 2011 23:50

Business IT - Security

Combining data-centric and system-centric views of an organisation's information systems, Acronis Backup & Recovery 11 may well have saved a few organisations from the recent slew of data loss incidents (if they'd used it).

It's sometimes serendipitous that a pre-determined launch date for a security product coincides with a matching disaster for which a solution is readily available.

Today's launch of Acronis Backup & Recovery 11 offers a range of tools that would have made life a lot simpler for victims of DistributeIT, had they made use of it.

Respondents to an earlier comment on the DistributeIT incident have observed that in fact the terms of service did include backup services, however anyone relying on such a provider's promises to perform these services might be interested in some land in Florida iTWire has available for sale.

iTWire asked Acronis' General Manager, Pacific Karl Sice for his thoughts on these very current affairs.  "Instances like the DistributeIT hacking, reinforce the importance of offsite backups.  In our recent Acronis Global Disaster Recovery Index, we found that nearly a third of Australian businesses did not have an offsite backup and disaster recovery strategy in place.  Companies need to ask themselves if they could survive losing all their critical data, whether it is caused by a malicious hack or, as we have seen recently, natural disasters like earthquakes, floods and hurricanes. If the answer is no, then an offsite backup plan needs to be implemented."

Sice continued, "Our survey also showed that 44% of businesses in Australia were not confident of their ability to avoid downtime in the event of a serious incident. When it comes to successfully recovering from a serious incident, the Australians were the least confident. Just 22% of Australian businesses felt that they would be able to recover quickly in the event of downtime, compared to a global average of 50%."

Whether organisations consider Acronis' products or not, the very important message is that they take responsibility for their own data.  Relying on another party (and the contract they have with that party) is little comfort when the catastrophic inevitable happens.

Legal action is little recompense for the loss of one's business.