Skip to navigation
   
Davey Winder's Blog

The office is on fire, forget the secretary and save the email

By Davey Winder in Editorial

Posted in Data Protection, Blog, email on July 4, 2008 at 9:12 am

Permalink | Author Profile

Kroll Ontrack obviously know a thing or two about data disasters, it is a company that spends its entire time working with the consequences of them. So who better than to do a data recovery survey with a twist: if you only had time to save one file which would it be?

Asking a cross-section of business types just what they consider to be the most vital of business data proved to be an interesting exercise. I am guessing that there was some kind of ‘assuming you had no backups’ suggestion implied in all this.

I asked my secretary, also known as ‘the wife’ or if she is in earshot ‘the lovely Yvonne’, what would she save for the good of the business. Rather sensibly, I guess, she said the accounts. “After all” she explained “HMRC are not going to accept ’sorry, they got mislaid by the courier’ as a valid excuse, are they.” She may well have a point.

Personally, I would choose exactly the same as an astonishing 81 percent of those surveyed and save my email. That’s my email message database, not my contacts file or appointments calendar, they can go hang - it is my message base that is vital to my business.

“Our statistics reveal that e-mails are the most important files for business executives,” said Phil Bridge, Managing Director, Kroll Ontrack UK. “Regardless of the size of IT budgets, organisations simply cannot afford to ignore implementing systems to help avoid severe data loss. Employee education, careful planning and rigorous backup testing of e-mail storage is the only way critical information is protected.”

The reasoning, Kroll argues, is simple: “the logistics required to restore a large e-mail system is complex, and due to its critical nature, downtime needs to be minimised.” Indeed, for this very reason many companies are now capping the storage capacity of user mailboxes and inadvertently increasing the risk of users losing their e-mails.

Kroll Ontrack put together some top tips to e-mail bliss for executives.

  • Manage your mailbox don’t let it manage you - keep it under control with regular housekeeping and archiving of old e-mails. Evaluate the importance of each e-mail and erase e-mails that you do not need. This will keep the mailbox size, and the risk of loss, at a minimum.

    Prepare - a disaster recovery plan will outline company policy and procedures for when it all goes wrong. If you don’t know what your firm’s disaster strategy is - ask!

    Don’t store e-mails locally - many executives store their oversized mailboxes locally, where it is not backed up. The safest archival method is to move items to a central drive that is regularly backed up.

    Seek advice - in the event that you accidentally delete the wrong message, your IT department should have a process to quickly retrieve the message from its backups. If this is a more serious issue, then tampering with the computer may limit what data can be retrieved.

  • 12345
    Rated: 100% (2 votes)
    Loading ... Loading ...

    Previous Post | Next Post

     
     
    Comments

    Trackback by Alvera Biglow - February 9, 2012 on 5:32 am

    sopa de pollo receta…

    […]council personnel at Lennox’s ultimate charm hearing again in September. […]…

    Make a comment

    * required

    * required

    We stop spam using reCaptcha.
    Type the words below and click Submit Comment.

       
    Tag cloud

    iPod Experiment debian computer SMS lawsuit credit card fraud archiving documentation Backlash theft web Acer Kin BSI Research Networks security Software teleworking football global data protection broadband Jesus Phone Harry Potter Palm Employment VPN Zango productivity Gateway Media IT Rant Pirate fun Scotland Europe Election RAM Retail biometrics MessageLabs graphics cloud fake Apps hubdub Data Centre Press Adobe Johnny Depp Ballmer Jobs Mobile Phones dumb Bill Gates Funny wifi black hat Microsoft Big Brother office news campaign Spotify Business e-commerce HP Russia Patents museum MSNBC gaming Beta Mafia Death sick Developers desktop staffing development web 2.0 linkedin Banned information stupidity Battery ROFL help Amazon Apple Firefox management Game standards ISPA Government President Steve Jobs Digital Footprint surveys earth hour mobile e virtual machine Video encryption Music printing adware NASA BOFH outsourcing chips Windows 7 Voice USA Notebooks Internet innovation IDC phishing Digg CAPTCHA Space Advertising survey Energy Google Earth Internet Explorer Windows computing man-in-the-middle Android Facebook rootkits Olympics Obama Trousers ISP parental control Texting YouTube Army virtual world xmas PS3 Intel Michael Jackson Microchip acquisition OS statistics mail Conference fraud Flash Architecture Marketing Deal transactional security ASUS Web Development Review Google Nexus virus trust memory Mobile Phone Sony Browser Education terrorism admin support IBM GSM money Cisco AMD iPad computers App Store christmas Gadget storage hacking data Geeks Analysis Top 10 digitise Children Health worker patch management Parenting Performance computing Netbook Programming report banks monetisation SSL Recall Supercomputer world of warcraft poll environment gadgets MiniBook spending stupid scareware Porn scam payments fool eBook millions avatar Finjan IP Gartner betting carbon copy Blogging NBC hypervisor Application malware Military universe disclosure smartphone School Licensing Enterprise library RATM McKinnon remote scan Sex family second life services iPhone 3G email science snooping search VeriSign patent home Vista copyright Eee PC remote working OCR botnet meme HPC economics Blog privacy ID Theft Twitter Yahoo console policy worm Steve Ballmer games nightmare Psychic Silverlight law service hardware credit crunch Tesco FBI Rumour Opinion payment server Psion network DNS Guardian Top 500 EU Trojan VM App green The Federation Texas Instruments open source technology Lotus tax Kaspersky holidays banking Meh size exploit Kill Switch Dell books crime Project China iPhone Mars Noro Eee hoax Nintendo Paris Hilton Windows Phone 7 Series Addiction Linux virtualisation symantec prison workplace politics InfoSec Study shopping recession work ecommerce social networking code Madness hacker tech Palm Pre GMail compromise students Browsers economy MSN Kindle migration spam XP Hack iPhone 3GS
    Advertisement
    Advertisement