Mobility
Backup and recovery solutions for mobile
devices
In-the-cloud service prevents loss of
data from hardware failure, theft, virus
attack and accidental deletion.
by Christopher Corbet and Daniel
Stevenson
As more employees carry portable devices and
use laptops to work at home, the airport or
remote sites, IT departments are struggling
to find ways to protect mobile data.
Mobile data is often the most current
data a company has, and is more vulnerable
to hardware failure, theft, virus attack and
accidental deletion than data on
well-protected servers and PCs. Unlike
server and desktop backup, which can be
managed centrally over the LAN, mobile
backup often depends on less-than-reliable,
often technically challenged employees who
may not connect to the corporate network for
days or weeks, resulting in a large portion
of data going unprotected.
Many companies are choosing to move
mobile data backup from the corporate
network into the cloud via a
backup-and-recovery service, which automates
mobile backup-and-restore processes, often
running in the background when the user
connects to the Internet. This type of
in-the-cloud service provides advanced
security and takes the capital costs,
infrastructure and staff burden of mobile
data backup and recovery out of the
enterprise’s hands.
Deciding
if a
mobile
backup-and-recovery
service
will be
beneficial
can be
determined
by
answering
the
following
questions.
How important is the company’s mobile
data? If mobile users gather current
sales information and orders on the road or
if the mobile data affects the company’s
compliance posture, the data should be
backed up regularly, with as little reliance
on the mobile user as possible. E-mail may
be another mission-critical data source
that, if stored locally, needs to be backed
up regularly.
How many employees are mobile?
If the number of mobile employees is in
the hundreds or thousands, managing
mobile backup in-house requires
considerable investments in storage and
IT staff resources. Smaller businesses
may not have the resources or staff to
spare. A backup-and-recovery service can
deliver predictable and scalable service
plans.
How often are employees mobile?
If the company’s mobile workers are away
from the office more than 20 percent of
the time, relying on each individual to
run their own backups according to
corporate policies is a risk. A service
can automate and manage the process,
while still allowing company
administrators to monitor and enforce
pre-established policies.
If a backup service makes sense as a
way to lower management overhead, data
center and hardware costs, there are
several areas to evaluate in choosing
the right service.
Is backup automated?
Does the service offer a truly automated
backup-and-recovery solution with little
to no user intervention required?
Is backup intrusive?
Does backup take over the mobile device,
preventing the user from getting work
done, or can it be set up to occur
unobtrusively in the background without
hogging CPU cycles and I/O?
Does backup hog bandwidth? Some
backup services use sophisticated
compression and block-based delta backup
technologies, which back up only incremental
changes within files, to reduce both
bandwidth and storage requirements. Some
work reliably over a dial-up connection,
which may be a requirement for mobile users
who frequent developing areas.
Is the backup agent easy to deploy?
If there is a backup client or agent, how
easy is it to configure according to company
policies and to deploy to hundreds of mobile
users? How flexible are the configuration
options?
Is data retrieval simple and
reliable? Does the service allow
users to access backed up data directly
without help? How intuitive is the
interface? How quickly can the user
retrieve an accidentally deleted file?
If the user needs to recover large
amounts of data, can the service provide
it via CD or DVD? Can a user restore a
single file or all data to a new laptop
or PC if necessary?
Can the user retrieve older data?
Recovery from a virus infection may
require restoring a previous version
created prior to the infection. Does the
service keep previous file versions
available for a period of time?
Are backups well protected?
Does the service transmit backup and
restore data with strong encryption,
such as 128-bit AES? Where and how is
data stored, and is it encrypted in
storage? What measures are taken to
prevent unauthorized users from
accessing and tampering with data? What
type of data protection and redundancy
is offered? Are there disaster-recovery
features in place, such as off-site
mirroring and failover? What is the
service’s record in terms of uptime?
Can administrators monitor backups
and generate reports?
Does the service allow IT administrators
to track mobile backups and restores and
enforce mobile backup policies? Can this
information be combined with data from
other security applications? The
correlation of this data may be useful
for proving compliance with regulatory
requirements.
Many services have the expertise
to help set up a backup regimen
according to established compliance
requirements, best practices and
data protection needs. To avoid
large-scale glitches on the initial
deployment, work with a service
provider that offers professional
services and has experience
deploying security applications in a
variety of computing environments.
Roll out and test the backup service
with a select pilot group of users
before deploying the solution across
the board.
Christopher Corbet is a product
manager at Fiberlink, Blue Bell, Pa.
Daniel Stevenson is director of
channel marketing at
Iron Mountain Digital, Boston, Mass.
Fiberlink
Iron Mountain Digital