News

Published on Thu 10 January, 2008
There is however, a humorous side to data loss. Ontrack Data Recovery reported incidents where a British scientist got fed up with a squeaky hard drive, so he drilled a hold in the casing and poured oil in. Unsurprisingly the hard drive stopped, but so did the squeaking! Another case is where a storage device was dropped out of an aeroplane, with a parachute of course, but the chute failed and destroyed the device.

Published on Thu 17 January, 2008
There is however, a humorous side to data loss. Ontrack Data Recovery reported incidents where a British scientist got fed up with a squeaky hard drive, so he drilled a hold in the casing and poured oil in. Unsurprisingly the hard drive stopped, but so did the squeaking! Another case is where a storage device was dropped out of an aeroplane, with a parachute of course, but the chute failed and destroyed the device.

Published on Thu 24 January, 2008
Sometimes it seems that people are trying to lose their data on purpose. Another data loss case is where an external hard drive became infested with ants. What did the tech do? He sprayed the ants with bug spray. Not surprisingly the ants died, and so did the hard drive. Other cases include the accidental spillage of acid on a drive, and even putting one through the washing machine.

Published on Thu 31 January, 2008
Of the many forms of malware out there, ‘downloaders’ can be the most costly. They allow a hacker to remotely upload malicious codes on to a victims computer. An example of a downloader is the ‘diehard’, Windows based downloader. The top downloader in terms of traffic volume for December was the NetSky.q worm which surged to 20% of email traffic last month.

Published on Thu 07 February, 2008
A London based newspaper reported recently that a numerous government MP’s are calling for criminal accountability in the face of major and repeated instances of data loss. The calls came as the details of 25 million child support claimants was lost, and one week later 3 million learner drivers were mysteriously wiped from the system. Proponents for new legislation claim that personal data loss is a widespread problem throughout government bodies and contractors.

Published on Thu 14 February, 2008
Theft and personal data loss has reported to have soared to record levels in 2007. Modern hackers are easily staying ahead of the technological curve and so far the only security systems have been reactive. A US tech Co. estimated that in 2006 162 million records were compromised. It’s a global problem and it’s going to need cooperation on a global scale to even begin to fight the problem.

Published on Thu 21 February, 2008
International common law has now set the precedent that corporation can be held responsible for data loss if it causes detriment to another party. In FJS Electronics V Fidelity Bank, Fidelity bank had a data loss that resulted in loss to FJS. FJS sued Fidelity and won. Australian corporations beware, international common law is relevant in Australia and without due diligence to your fiduciary standard of care you will be held liable.

Published on Thu 28 February, 2008
Soho.org reports seven mandatory steps to fulfil your fiduciary duty to prevent data loss: 1. Perform daily backups, 2. Take the data off site/back on-site daily, 3. Perform weekly full backups, 4. Do weekly test restores on random files, 5.Always rotate tapes, 6. Catalog tapes and 7. Replace tapes on a regular basis. Fortunately there are options for small business for restoring data quickly and efficiently like the Acronis True Image range of data backup and recovery software.

Published on Mon 07 April, 2008
Unreliable electricity supplies, natural disasters, terrorist attacks and faulty hardware have highlighted the need for businesses, large and small, to have systems to deal with potential downtime of machines and data. As computing systems become more complex they also become more inter-dependent, which means if one part of the system goes down, the entire chain can be adversely affected. It's amazing how many companies do not actually have a disaster recovery plan in place. These days most companies do at least make backups of important data, but very few have implemented methods to get up and running should a disaster actually occur. Have a one terrabyte external drive backed up with company data is fine (so long as it's offsite) but what do you do with it if your hard-drive is a smouldering mess?

Published on Mon 14 April, 2008
Every enterprise needs to be certain they are able to restore their electronic systems in the event of some unforseen disaster. Enterprise decision makers understand why business continuity is important: The survival of the enterprise depends on it. One great way to ensure that data continuity is to install Acronis True Image which allows an image to be taken when the server/system is operating at optimum performance and then to restore to that moment should disaster strike or the server fail. Of course, incremental backups and other functions are available which makes this software an unbeatable form of ensuring data will always be able to be restored in the even of some nasty dilemma that might just wipe all your data.

Published on Mon 21 April, 2008
Planning is the key to disaster recovery, and it is the responsibility of the IT Manager to convince management they need to spend the money to ensure the data security. A popular and effective tactic is for the IT Manager to make the Business Managers aware of the trials and pitfalls of not being properly prepared for a possible disaster, citing downtime, costs of recover, opportunity costs for business lost during the period the systems are inoperable and other risks the business faces sans protection. Only then should the IT Manager discuss the solution options. This is obviously very similar to the way an insurance salesman might pitch financial protection in the case of disaster. It's playing on fear, but it's justified.