Bob Cramer--Security Challenges and Solutions<br></br> for Small Companies

Business data, from the general ledger to orders, inventory, and customer lists, are the corporate jewels--your most precious business assets. The loss of that information can critically damage a business of any size--according to the Small Business Administration and other authorities, major data loss can mean the death of a small business--yet business owners often underestimate the risks of data loss and overestimate the reliability and security of their data recovery systems.

To find out more about security challenges and solutions for small businesses, we talked with Robert Cramer, president and CEO of LiveVault, whose online backup and recovery service was recently named a finalist in the Best Storage Software Solution category for the 21st Annual CODiE Awards.

Q: What do you see as the biggest security challenge facing small and medium businesses (SMBs) today?

A: The security situation has changed so fast. Think about it. Ten years ago, if a business had computers, it was sort of a complement to the business. Five years ago, use of computers became core to many businesses. Today, in many cases, the computer is the business: The primary functions of the business and its critical data live on computers. But the business owner’s expertise is in the business itself, not in information technology. Because computers are so important today, business owners are being forced to become IT experts. What we, as vendors, need to do for them is to automate the management of IT so that they can focus their energy back on the business.

Q: What is the most common misconception that SMBs have about information security?

A: That they’re safe. For example, for the past 20 years, most businesses have backed up their data to tape. Someone runs the backups, but seldom if ever does anyone test to be sure they can restore their data from tapes, check the error logs, etc. As I said before, SMBs don't have a high level of IT expertise in-house, and they don't want to spend the time on these basic IT functions. But analysts estimate that up to 50% of those tape backups fail--the data can't be restored from them--because of configuration problems, full file systems, and other issues. Or maybe a smaller company, say a dentist's practice, backs up each night to a CD or disk and the office manager takes that disk home with them. First, there’s the same issue as with tape backups: No one tests to see whether the data is recoverable. Second, what if someone breaks into their car when they stop for groceries on their way home? The backup data is typically not encrypted [coded], so patients' medical, financial, and other personal information has been stolen. In the medical field, this violates HIPAA requirements. In other businesses, it would violate Sarbanes-Oxley requirements.

Today, virtually every computer is connected to the Internet, so information is vulnerable from that side. There are threats from disasters, Internet attacks, and data theft. The business owner needs to be on top of all those things, yet through habit and lack of time to spend on IT functions, they’re often relying on potentially failed backups to protect their business information. That’s a huge risk, and that’s why our company offers services to automate the backup and restore functions for businesses. We have multiple data centers around the country, and all data is in at least two vaults, so even if one center is hit by a disaster, there’s no single point of failure. That way businesses have reliable data backup to ensure business continuity in case of disasters, Internet attacks, system failures, etc., and the business owners and staff aren’t spending their time and energy on those tasks.

Q: Do most SMBs think in terms of business continuity?

A: No, unfortunately. Most businesses don't think in those terms because they think it can’t happen to them. In the last few years, we’ve seen 9/11 and hurricanes Charlie and Katrina. These create regional pockets of awareness about information security, but people tend to forget. And that’s serious because the Small Business Administration estimates that 90% of small businesses that fail to recover their data fail within the next two years.

Q: Your company, LiveVault, is an SMB. How do you use technology to create new business models and to keep your company competitive?

A: The technology to do what we do didn't exist even five years ago. Bandwidth is a big factor. For example, think about dental offices that use the Kodak Dental System for medical images. Five years ago, a survey found that less than 10% of dental offices had broadband connections. Today, it’s more than 98%, so it’s possible to perform remote backups on large amounts of image data. Plummeting disk prices have also allowed us to offer services that we couldn’t have before.