Is Your City's Data Safe?
by Chris Noyes
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It only takes one catastrophic data loss event in a network administrator’s career to ensure it will never happen again. The 20-hour days spent recovering all the user accounts, e-mail accounts and user directories, then crossing your fingers hoping that the backup you have on hand is useable, will prematurely age even the heartiest person.
Think of your city’s computer infrastructure. What would happen if lightning, flood, tornado, hurricane or another horrible natural disaster hit any one of your buildings? What happens if the server room in your I.T. department floods out because the sprinkler system goes off by accident, or for what it was designed for?
The only nice thing about a natural disaster is that you can see it coming — from a couple of hours to a couple of days beforehand. An unknown outbreak of any one of the 500 nasty viruses or worms that come out each month can leave even the most diligent network administrator dead in the water. No amount of stomping will bring your data back... unless you’re prepared for it.
Many smaller municipalities and even some large ones do not even have I.T. departments to worry about this. What does your organization have? Do you have one person who took a Microsoft Office class three years ago serving as your I.T. person, or do you have an MCSE who has years of experience with networks and computer operating systems? Regardless of who’s protecting your mission-critical data, someone somewhere must be backing it up.
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Your organization must see data protection and backup with an insurance mentality. Most businesses cannot justify spending millions of dollars in redundant, real-time, off-site mirroring technology. There must be a risk assessment of mission-critical data and an analysis of what must be spent to be able to pick ourselves up from a significant loss. For most, there are inexpensive ways to back up data without breaking the budget.
First of all, what do you need to back up? Do any of the users on the network keep their word-processing and spreadsheet files locally on their workstation? If so, you need to have them put these files on a file server that gets backed up. If their hard drive crashes, what happens to all this data? Well, in 99 times out of a 100, it’s gone!
Don’t rely on 3-inch floppy disks to back your data up. They go bad too easily. In addition, swapping floppy disks between computers is not a good idea, especially when it comes to viruses and other nasty bugs out there. If it’s backed up daily on a server, the most you lose is one day’s work.
Also, if all your databases are located on one or multiple servers in your organization and they aren’t backed up daily, any transactions with those failed database servers are lost. Not only do you have to get another server up and running, but you’ll have to manually key in all those receipts and invoices to get the software back up to date.
A good way to ensure data protection is to store multiple copies of your valuable data on multiple pieces of media. Redundancy is the only true protection against data loss. Record your data using the verification feature in whatever software package you choose. You can record all the data off the servers you want, but if it’s not verified, there is no guarantee that it will be restorable. Store this media off-site in a secure location such as a safety deposit box at a local bank. Also, purchase new media on a regular basis to rotate your tapes out. Someone should be taking the previous night’s tapes home or to another secure location in case there is a disaster at your organization.
The network administrator for your city or organization should have policies and procedures in place to take care of any potential incident that may arise. If there is nothing currently in place, have him or her read this article, then give us a call at the Florida League of Cities. If your network administrator already has a solid policy in place to take care of potential data loss . . . give ’em a pat on the back!
For more information on data retention standards for the State of Florida, please visit http://www.dos.state.fl.us/dlis/barm/rules/1B26_003FAC.htm or e-mail the League's Technology Services Department.
For more information on the League’s training, auditing and consulting services, please e-mail Frank Hagy, chief information officer, or call him at (407) 835-3471, ext. 137.
Chris Noyes is an IS support specialist for the Florida League of Cities.
Reprinted from Quality Cities March/April 2002
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