This holiday season, give your inner geek a gift

As it approaches that time for giving, it’s worth pointing out that with just a simple purchase, you can simultaneously give yourself and me a present. I’m assuming regular readers of the blog would like to thank me, and the best thanks I could get this year would be to get a nice spike in sales in my book before the end of the year.

“Enterprise Systems Backup and Recovery: A corporate insurance policy” is a book aimed not just at companies only now starting to look at implementing a comprehensive backup system. It’s equally aimed at companies who are already doing enterprise backup and need that extra direction to move from a collection of backup products to an actual backup system.

What’s a backup system? At the most simple, it’s an environment that is geared towards recovery. However, it’s not just having the right software and the right hardware – it’s also about having:

• The right policies
• The right procedures
• The right people
• The right attitude

Most organisations actually do pretty well in relation to getting the right software and the right hardware. However, that’s only about 40% of achieving a backup system. It’s the human components – that last remaining 60% that’s far more challenging and important to get right. For instance, at your company:

• Are backups seen as an “IT” function?
• Are backups assigned to junior staff?
• Are results not checked until there’s a recovery required?
• Are backups only tested in an adhoc manner?
• Are recurring errors that aren’t really errors tolerated?
• Are procedures for requesting recoveries adhoc?
• Are backups thought of after systems are added or expanded?
• Are backups highly limited to “save space”?
• Is the backup server seen as a “non-production” server?

If the answer to even a single one of those questions is yes, then your company doesn’t have a backup system, and your ability to guarantee recoverability is considerably diminished.

Backup systems, by integrating the technical and the human aspect of a company, provide a much better guarantee of recoverability than a collection of untested random copies that have no formal procedures for their creation and use.

And if the answer to even a single one of those questions is yes, you’ll get something useful and important out of my book.

So, if you’re interested in buying the book, you can grab it from Amazon using this link, or from the publisher, CRC press, using this link.