Backup Plan for your Backup Plan

As a company grows in size, it generally becomes responsible for larger and larger amounts of money, customers, and personal information in the form of both paper and data. Most companies that have managed to grow out of their garages are smart enough to implement a backup plan to recover this information in case of disasters. However, very few fully test those plans, and even fewer come up with a backup plan in case their first backup plan fails.

I bring this up because I saw this article today where a technician managed to not only delete the data for a $38 billion dollar account, but he also succeeded in formatting the backup drive and completely wiping all of its data. Bravo. Luckily this company DID have a backup backup plan. They used magnetic tape. Unfortunately, they hadn't actually tested that plan, and the tapes were unusable. Also attempts to recover the data from the hard drives by Microsoft and Dell failed. So because of this lack of follow through the company spent $200,000 having to rescan in all the data from paper.

So why is it that companies continually turn a blind eye when IT professionals bring these scenarios to management hoping to resolve the problem before it occurs? Time and time again companies lose more money than they save by not listening to their IT staff. If management can't trust the IT staff to make the right decision when it comes to making sure systems are robust enough and backup plans are tested to ensure data integrity, then why are they on the staff? Either management knows better regarding the data center infrastructure, or the IT professional administrators do, it can't be both ways. Wake up cooperate America, its time to quit with the plan for today because what happens tomorrow isn't our problem yet mentality.