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A Matter of Trust
Despite these kinds of rave reviews, CIOs report common drawbacks to outsourcing data backup:
- Fragmented or corrupt files remain damaged, even on the backups.
- Companies still need to manage legacy storage devices and recover data that previously was stored on tapes, disks and other removable media -- something most standalone storage solutions and SSPs won't tackle without significant additional investment.
- When a contract concludes, there is no way to ensure that an outsourced storage provider will eradicate data sufficiently.
In addition to these pitfalls, other downsides include concerns associated with forfeiting control of data, the steep bandwidth requirements and the time it takes to restore data.
The control factor is perhaps most central. Particularly in the SSP model (see "Evaluating SSPs"), several nagging issues arise, such as: Who touches the data once it leaves the premises? How secure is it off site? How well is data encrypted as it travels across the open Internet?
Jerry Cantrell, senior vice president of IT at First Citizens National Bank in Dyersburg, Tenn., asked himself these questions last year when he decided to outsource data backup to EVault. He hemmed. He hawed. Finally, after account managers assured him the process would secure the bank's most critical customer data, Cantrell relaxed. Still, sometimes he can't help but worry, he says.
"You're always concerned with someone else handling your data," says Cantrell, whose bank boasts more than 20 branches and $860 million in assets. "Yes, the data is safe. But the paranoia never subsides."
Another downside is bandwidth consumption. Even in situations where data is backed up to a standalone server on site, certain backups can require copying terabytes upon terabytes of information a day. Sending this information over a company's primary T-1 line could slow traffic considerably. For those who transmit Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) over the same pipes, quality-of-voice traffic may suffer too.
Cantrell eliminated this concern for First Citizens National Bank by adding a bonded T-1 line to his existing line for a 3-megabyte pipe.
In 2005, at Cooke & Beiler, an investment management company in Philadelphia, IT Manager Asha Joshi employed the same strategy. With two lines, Joshi figured he'd be able to direct data backup traffic to an off-site data center from Iron Mountain over one line and general Internet traffic over the other. So far, the solution has worked.
"For us, investing in this additional bandwidth was worth the peace of mind," says Joshi. "Now, even if we're backing up vast amounts of data, our general Internet traffic doesn't suffer at all."
Even with nearly unlimited bandwidth, retrieving data from an outsourced backup provider can take time -- 24 hours or more. Though that's faster than CIOs can pull it off removable media such as tapes or disks, it may not be fast enough to avoid disruption of business.
One way to address this drawback is through the performance and service-level guarantees in the outsourcer contract. At Parnassus Investments, for example, when Technology Manager Mark Lee decided to outsource backup to EVault in 2005, he went out of his way to stipulate precisely when and how the vendor would restore data when Parnassus needed it.
"We have a series of requirements for files of different type and size," he says. "Today, whether we have a crisis or a user mistakenly deletes a file, we can recover data relatively quickly and painlessly," in many cases within hours of the incident.
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