Is it Safe?

Like a current UK advert for Revels where I wonder how many understand the homage to The Deer Hunter, is it only people of a certain age who will think dentists, Laurence Olivier and Marathon Man? But actually I mean your data. I had one of those scary moments this morning. A worrying looking blue screen, and I suffered an adrenaline rush of the wrong kind - when was the last time I'd hit the Onetouch save button? Oh dear... about 8 days ago. I'm amazed how many professionals, or even organisations are just too blasé with their data. Those of us who come from an earlier time in IT, when disks went wrong on a regular basis, will have a particular device that was the bain of their lives - for me it was the IBM 3370 (which was the first thin film technology disk). These days disks are so reliable, people get away with sloppy personal IT management. My solution to the problem is a Maxtor Onetouch external USB drive . When I leave the PC at the end of the day, I press the button on the front and anything new or changed gets saved - easy, providing you remember to do it!

 Thankfully for me, the adrenaline fuelled wait after I'd hit the power off, then on button ended in XP Professional clearing itself up and starting properly. I hit that Onetouch button as soon as the restart finished. Phew! But it reminded me that with the various Software as a Service (SaaS) systems I use, there was no problem. All that backup and recovery for my accounting system, various intranets, content management system and demo systems are someone else's headache, and with a much better disaster recovery solution than most individual organisations can afford - some of them mirror their data to servers on the other side of the world every 24 hours. It's one of the key reasons why company's should be taking SaaS very seriously. Is your system safe?

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