February 2007 — News
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Data Protection: Make a Wise Decision
2/15/2007—It's not unusual for school district staff members to emulate Lewis Carroll's Mad Hatter, wearing six or eight hats simultaneously in their everyday efforts. Sometimes, the hat hardest to wear is IT management, which is important and challenging at the same time.
School districts operate on information; more importantly, available information. When that information is lost or access is interrupted, the impact can be felt among parents, students, faculty, and staff. The permanent loss of budgeting documents, student records, e-mail messages, or class registration data for thousands of students and employees would be catastrophic.
Potentially fatal data loss puts a priority on protecting and securing information. Smaller school districts are often at a disadvantage when trying to protect valuable business information, as they typically lack in IT budgets. Gartner estimates that less than half of all mid-size and only 25 percent of small organizations have disaster recovery plans in place.
Smaller schools face the same fundamental backup and data protection concerns as larger ones: What is the most cost-effective method to reliably protect and recover critical information? For many of these schools, the problem is even more difficult because they do not have ample IT staff to design, deploy and manage data storage backup and recovery systems.
The unanticipated loss of data is the reason to back up. The usual reasons considered for failure are earthquake, fire, and flood, but in fact the more likely reasons are hardware failure, software failure, viruses and worms, and human error/mishandling. Smaller organizations are more vulnerable to human error and sabotage, since equipment is often in an open office environment and is maintained by inexperienced and overloaded staff. If a disk drive fails, they could lose access to past registration and attendance files, grading documents, or essential accounting records.
The other essential question is: With all the material currently on disk, what should be backed up? The temptation would be to back up everything, whether it is a business record or not, but there is little business value in your aunt's photos from the Grand Canyon or your niece's breakup trauma. Backing up everything makes good sense, but your best efforts should focus on records that change.
A record is a document that contains the facts and relevant information your school utilizes in its day-to-day operations. Without records, you could not make many essential decisions and could not plan for the future in an organized and systematic manner.
Achieving backup goals
Like almost any event, data backup must be goal-oriented. Time and effort need to be invested in the planning and execution of backup. The three types of backup are full (which backs up all files regardless of whether they have changed); differential (which backs up all files modified since the last full backup); and incremental (which backs up only files that have changed since the last backup of any kind).
