Companies that fail to make recovery plans for their electronic gear and essential data are inviting serious financial injury when an emergency strikes.

TechNewsWorld discussed disaster preparedness with a panel of IT experts. Check out their recommendations — and make sure that you have not forgotten that one key thing that many companies forget to protect but regret afterward.

IDC Findings

A 2018 IDC report entitled “The State of IT Resilience” warns businesses not to fall into the trap that snarls many companies each year when emergencies happen. These firms view disaster recovery (DR) preparedness as an insurance policy and an added expense that is likely to have little payback.

This approach to disaster recovery is inadequate for today’s digital businesses. If DR tools and initiatives are viewed as a cost center objective and not as a business driver, an organization’s cloud and digital transformation (DX) initiatives will be exposed to a higher rate of failure, the report warns.

Other research estimates that as many as half of all organizations could not survive a disaster event. That research also found that many businesses do not properly protect their data, test their disaster recovery environment, or have automated DR processes in place.

“After an already stressful 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic, forecasters are expecting an above-average number of hurricanes this season. Regrettably, many businesses may be unprepared to weather those storms and could experience permanent data loss if they aren’t ready from an IT perspective,” Caroline Seymour, vice president of product marketing at Zerto, told TechNewsWorld.

To avoid becoming another victim, she recommends maintaining critical business operations, preserving valuable data, and ensuring IT resilience by having a formal DR plan in place that can be enacted rapidly.

In addition to having cloud-based disaster recovery technology implemented and tested, IT teams need to practice their DR plans to understand what works well and where there are opportunities for improvement, Seymour cautioned.

The Cost of Not Preparing

IT resilience — essential to disaster recovery — is a measure of an organization’s ability to protect data during planned disruptive events, effectively react to unplanned events, and accelerate data-oriented business initiatives. It includes traditional disaster recovery and backup tools, and also incorporates advanced analytics and security capabilities needed for the success of any digital business in the 21st century.

IDC’s research found that many organizations are seeing new forms of disruptions, such as ransomware, cause considerable downtime.

Here are some key findings from IDC’s disaster recovery research:

• More than half of the respondents are currently undertaking IT or digital transformation projects and view IT resilience. They see IT resilience as foundational. But few respondents believe their IT resilience strategy is optimized.
• Most organizations surveyed have experienced tech-related business disruptions. These situations resulted in material impact in terms of either recovery cost or additional staff hours, direct loss of revenue, permanent loss of data, or damage to company reputation.
• Data protection (DP) and disaster recovery (DR) are central tenets of digital transformation initiatives but may not be prioritized by many organizations.
• Only half of all apps are fully covered by a DR strategy. This indicates a disconnect at the business strategy level regarding the importance of data protection and data recovery to the organization’s initiatives.

Much Can Go Wrong

The research found that many companies struggle with the cost, complexity, and orchestration of their data protection and disaster recovery solutions. Almost half of the respondents (45 percent) reported challenges with restore or backup reliability.

The complexity of the backup and recovery process was also a leading challenge for 43 percent of the companies. These factors have a high probability of delaying or disrupting IT transformation (DX) initiatives.

That complexity process is pushing some 90 percent of the participating companies to pursue a convergence of backup and DR tools as they eliminate redundant tools. This indicates that users increasingly see backup and DR functions not as siloed products by as complementary assets of a single solution.

Researchers believe the best practice for corporate data recovery is to define what IT resilience means for their organization and develop a plan for implementation. That definition should begin with the core elements of data protection, backup, and disaster recovery.

It should also account for emerging security threats and address the requirements of all business applications. That includes on-premises or public cloud-based. It should not include a one-size-fits-all IT resilience solution.

“As of July 2020, the US has experienced 10 weather- and climate-related disaster events, losing more than $1 billion each time. This does not even count the storms that took out parts of the Northeast last week (Hurricane Asaias),” Jennifer Curry, vice president of Global Cloud Services at INAP, told TechNewsWorld.

Recipe for Recovery

Successful disaster preparedness entails prioritization and communication. Curry outlined three ways companies can protect their data and information before disaster strikes:

Step One: Identify Risks
For many organizations, losing data and information is the biggest threat. Start by identifying where their data is stored, if there are copies, and if so, where are the copies stored (onsite or in a separate location).

“Having all information stored in one place is extremely risky because one natural disaster can wipe out everything,” she said.

Step Two: Think About Off-Site Backups
If an organization does store data separate from its primary location, that is half the battle.

“To further protect their assets, companies should select a backup site that is in a different geographical region to reduce the chances that both locations would be knocked out by one disaster,” she reasoned.

Step Three: Consider Disaster Recovery Solutions
Many companies use cloud storage as a backup since it is easily scaled and cost-effective. However, a more robust option is disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS).

“DRaaS is essentially a facility redundancy in company infrastructures. It replicates mission-critical information, applications, and data so companies can maintain business continuity during natural disasters,” Curry explained.

“IT teams will be strapped when disaster strikes, and rather than having them tackle multiple requests from stakeholders across the organization, they are more successful if they have a prioritized list of applications,” she offered.

INAP tells clients to make sure comprehensive business continuity is developed before a devastating event happens. This also serves as an opportunity to identify the risks and gaps that may be commonly missed.

Balancing the Risks

Managing data loss is a case of reducing risks and consequences. The risk cannot and will not ever reach zero, according to David Zimmerman, CEO of LC Technology International.

“Events like fires, floods, tornados, earthquakes, and other disasters can result in business-altering data losses. Floods (especially salt water) severely damage equipment such as servers, SD cards, and laptops. With corrosion from seawater, data recovery might be impossible,” he told TechNewsWorld.

However, the right mix of training, corporate protocols, and cloud backups can greatly reduce the downsides of any data losses, making them slight inconveniences instead of business-ending disasters, he added.

Companies can protect their electronics and data during an emergency by incorporating the risks of data loss into a disaster recovery plan that evaluates the physical and virtual locations of their data. Then review how susceptible both would be to loss from fire, floods, or other events, suggested Zimmerman.

Sidestep Mishaps

Many small business operators with no IT staff tend to think a single backup to an external hard drive or storage uploads to a cloud service is all they need. This is dangerous thinking, according to Zimmerman.

Just because your business does not have a full staff with a fancy data management system does not mean you cannot take smaller, easy steps to protect your data.

“A single backup to a hard drive is the first step a business without the resources of an IT staff can do. However, it must go beyond that.

Without a formal data protection plan, all your hard work and content are at risk every day it is not duplicated. There are easy steps to proactively prevent this from happening,” he said.

Small business operators should follow what larger companies that have IT workers do. Implement a policy of redundancy.

This involves making multiple layers of backups, often more than you think is necessary. Create backups with the cloud combined with external hard drive storage. These should be used in tandem, not as replacements for each other, recommended Zimmerman.

“Managing the risk from any natural disaster should start with an inventory of all corporate-owned data. Back everything up to external hard drives — noting that these are kept off-site — that’s the important part. If a disaster strikes and all the data is held in the office, then the backups are pointless,” he offered.

One Thing Not to Forget

Many organizations still do not see the importance of creating a disaster recovery plan prior to a disaster happening, despite the massive risk of losing data that could impact the company’s future, Zimmerman shared. The most critical point of data recovery is proactivity.

“You don’t want to have to scramble to create a data recovery plan after a disaster strikes. The plan should function as a roadmap that includes all the sources and locations of data and who is responsible for it,” he advised.

Evaluating what to do and where to go after data is lost can be crippling to a business model, company reputation, and ability to actually do business. That can hurt any existing relationships with customers and partners.

“Forgetting to protect something is usually not the problem. What companies regret most is not doing periodic restore testing from backup data and testing disaster recovery plans. If companies are unprepared, it prolongs downtime and in some cases leads to data loss,” Shawn Lubahn, account product manager at Barracuda Networks, told TechNewsWorld. 

If you are interested in learning more about Manual Data Recovery, please visit our page:

The post How to Protect Data From Disasters? first appeared on LC Technology.

The post How to Protect Data From Disasters? appeared first on LC Technology.

Imagine heading back to your studio after an intense shooting day, and surprisingly explore that your mini-mag has been bombed-out. Fortunately, this nightmare can easily be avoided. Read below those insights given by a data recovery expert about video loss prevention.

Losing your precious data is a by definition, a filmmaker’s nightmare that can happen to the best of us. However, the good news is that it can easily be avoided. We interviewed David Zimmerman, CEO of LC Technology International, which is a data recovery expert, who has worked with filmmakers of every level, from at-home amateurs to Hollywood content creators, to recover data from damaged, deleted, or corrupt devices. These are his tips.

The Achilles hill of the digital age

Avoiding many data-related nightmares in post-production is often a case of preparation. As the world moves to digital, the problems that arise are often related to the captured output of digital content. Differing file formats, various brands of flashcards, and unpredictable shooting conditions all come together to put data at risk. Thankfully, camera operators that take the time to understand how data is written and stored can put best practices in place for video loss prevention.

As the world moves to digital, the problems that arise are often related to the capture output of digital content

Camera operator’s fault

When errors are noticed in post-production, the problem is often with the storage card, and is caused by a case of “user error.” Here are some of the more common issues:

• The camera operator turns off the camera before the data is fully written to the card. The camera is no longer recording, but the data is cached and needs a minute to move to the card without corruption.
• The card is removed abruptly and interrupts the data being written to the card.
• Cards are swapped between cameras. That is especially risky when utilizing the same card for two different camera types. Varying formats are structured differently, and interchanging cards can introduce errors.
• Exposure to humidity fluctuations, liquids, or dirt can ruin the cards.
• Operators should take care to discharge any static charge before carrying their equipment or handling flash cards.

Test your memory card regularly

Flashcards do wear out and should be tested periodically to ensure they’re functioning correctly. Consider using a utility that can test the speed and capacity of a card. If there are any issues, then put that card on the shelf and use a new one. It’s a classic risk-reward where you’re spending a little more on a high-end card, but avoiding a catastrophic video loss and costly production delays. There are numerous cases when bombed-out SanDisk professional cards were not recognized by the computer after intense shooting days.

Flashcards do wear out and should be tested periodically to ensure they’re functioning correctly

David Zimmerman, CEO of LC Technology International

Make several copies on different locations

A filmmaker shares his story: “I am a wedding videographer who had to do a force quit on my computer, and while I did it, I pulled an SD card out before it had time to sufficiently upload all those giant files. The next time I booted up and saw the files were gone – I put the card in, and NOTHING was on it except little boxes with an “!” in them, saying data was not there. I was sunk….”. There are two ways to avoid this: Perform a proper shutdown process and work off a copy

Created copies either on a different machine, the cloud, or an external drive

During post-production, someone will typically copy the content of the card and then load on their computer and edit it with their preferred studio-level product. They’re now working off of a hard drive instead of flash and must ensure they’ve created copies either on a different machine, the cloud, or an external drive. A separate physical location for one of the copies is a smart hedge against flood, theft, or fire. The time required to create backups is minimal, and the costs for storage fall every year, so there’s no excuse for being caught without backups. Moving a full 256 GB card to the cloud can take a few hours depending on your connection speed, but setting that in motion takes a few minutes.

The post-production work should always be done on a copy, leaving the original and backups as the fail-safes. Filmmakers that treat their recording media as long-term storage are setting themselves up for disaster. The cards are fragile and easy to lose and are meant as go-betweens from the camera to a more permanent location. Furthermore, for important studio-level work, it’s essential to use a single card for each project, and then implement strict rules for redundancies.

The next time I booted up and saw the files were gone – I put the card in, and NOTHING was on it except little boxes with an “!” in them, saying data was not there. I was sunk….

Fixing the card – cheaper than reshooting a scene

Fixing the card and format problems is possible with expert help. It’s indeed the last resort. However, it’s undoubtedly less expensive than gathering the team together and reshooting the scenes. Nevertheless, it’s crucial to choose the right expert for the job. Visit  LC Technology International for more info and help.

Summary

To simplify all that info, check out the slide below. It summarises all the important stuff which is pretty straightforward. Save it! It might save your data!

• Do not turn the camera off before the data is fully written to the card
• Perform Proper camera shutdown (NO hard shutdown)
• Do not utilize the same card for 2 different cameras
• Test your card periodically to ensure it functions properly
• Discharge the camera’s static charge before inserting the flashcard
• Avoid exposing the card to humidity, liquids, and dirt
• Make several copies of your data and work off a copy
• For more info, please visit lc-tech.com
• To find more about video loss prevention or if you already lost your videos please visit here VIDEORECOVERY

Article source HERE

The post Video Loss Prevention and Post Production Nightmares first appeared on LC Technology.

The post Video Loss Prevention and Post Production Nightmares appeared first on LC Technology.