It’s 4:30 on Friday afternoon when you get the message that a key vendor will not be able to deliver what they promised on time, which will in turn cause YOU to miss a critical deadline for your most important client. Frustrated, you call the vendor, who instantly denies ever being told about the deadline.

You know deadlines were discussed but can’t find it in your original written agreement. You then turn to your e-mail only to be forced to dig through hundreds of messages to try and find the e-mail where you conveyed the importance of this project being delivered on time, but you can’t find it because it was deleted.

Sound familiar? Or perhaps you’ve been in a similar situation where you’ve had to “archive search” for old e-mail communications? Think about it – almost all of your business communications and negotiations are performed via e-mail, making them important documents to keep for reference. And since you send and receive hundreds if not thousands of e-mail messages annually, it just makes sense to have a simple and easy way to find old communication threads. But this isn’t just a convenience issue, it’s a legal one.

What Every Business Is Required By Law To Do

Some industries have strict guidelines on storing e-mail communications (financial institutions for example). But what most people don’t realize is that ALL businesses need to address email
storage and in this instance, ignorance is far from bliss – it could put you and your organization in serious legal trouble.

David Thompson, AXS-One, explains the legal and business reasons why e-mail archiving is a must :
“Enron, Morgan Stanley and the Australian Wheat Board are familiar names that may send shivers down the spine of senior management. All these organisations have been involved in controversy over e-mails that have cost the company’s reputation and/or resulted in large fines. Companies need to be prepared for “electronic discovery.”

Simply put, this means you must know where your data is and how to retrieve it. Failure to do so can lead to fines or loss of a lawsuit. Those in IT records management need to be aware of the protection required when it comes to electronic documents; having no protection carries risks that the business may not be able to sustain.

While Australia doesn’t have a Sarbanes-Oxley Act as in the United States, there are a number of legal obligations for the retention, and destruction of e-mails and other electronic records. For example, the Corporations Act (which requires items to be retained for seven years) and applications for employment (six months).

In addition, records created by the HR department and Occupational Health and Safety may be covered by a number of statutes all with varying retention periods from six months to 25 years or more.”

The post Could You Be Breaking The Law By Not Archiving E-mails? appeared first on Mon Technology | IT Support Melbourne.

If your server suddenly crashed and ALL your data was erased, how long would it take before your business was back up and running as usual?

Have you ever lost an hour of work or a document because your computer crashed in the middle of you working on something? Remember how frustrating that was?

Now imagine losing FAR more data than that. Imagine losing…

…All your accounting documentation and history…

…Your client records, history and database…

…Lost all the work files you’ve spent YEARS developing…

Can you even put a price tag on it? Probably not – yet so many business owners aren’t 100% certain that they could be back up and running after a disaster and are purely hoping that their current tape drive or backup is working and storing a usable copy of their data.

The 3 Biggest Misunderstandings Businesses Have About Their Backup Systems That Give Them A False Sense Of Security:

Misunderstanding #1: Tape Backups Are A Reliable Way To Secure Your Data. Wrong! Tape backups have an average failure rate of 100% (no, that’s not a typo). What makes this even worse is that tape backups will APPEAR to be working, giving you a false sense of security, and you’ll only discover you’ve lost it all when you try to recover data after a disaster.

Misunderstanding #2: Thinking That Backing Up Your Data Will Allow You To Quickly Restore Your Network To Its Original State, Quickly And Easily.

This is a MAJOR misconception!

Let’s suppose we made an exact replica of all the items in your house right now and put them offsite in a storage facility – that’s a backup of your “data.” If your house burned to the ground (God forbid!) we would have to rebuild the HOUSE (which is the server, software and supporting environment) BEFORE we could restore all your items back from the storage facility. Obviously that takes some time.

That’s why simply having an offsite copy of your data doesn’t guarantee you’ll be back up and running FAST. It could take several days – possibly weeks – before everything was restored; and that’s assuming you HAVE the data in a clean state and all the originally installed software disks.

Misunderstanding #3: Trusting Their Backup Is Automatically Working Without Doing Periodic Test Restores. I see this happening a LOT – a business owner thinks their backups are working because they don’t see any error messages or apparent problems. Then, when they need to restore a file, they discover the backups stopped working MONTHS ago and all that data is gone.

Reality is that you need someone monitoring and periodically conducting test restores or “fire drills” on a regular basis to make absolutely certain everything is working just fine.

Want To Know For Sure If Your Data Is Safe? Call 03 9486 9000

The post 3 Biggest Misunderstandings About Business Backup appeared first on Mon Technology | IT Support Melbourne.