

Your portfolio management accounting system obviously isn’t the only essential data at your office. However, these backups should be encrypted, whether they are stored on a USB drive or through on online backup service. Investment advisors cannot afford to forgo insurance against the unexpected there is simply no excuse not to have multiple backups of your most important data. For most RIAs, the data is so utterly vital that they cannot afford to take any chances. In the past, I have preached about the necessity of backing up data through a variety of methods. Perform quality checks and have a contingency plan in case your vendor fails to do the job. Your data is priceless – you couldn’t sue the vendor for enough to make up for the loss of your data, so even if you contract with a vendor for data backup, your firm needs to own the process. It is probably detailed in 7-point font, where most data backup vendors tell you that they won’t reimburse you for more than you pay them on a monthly basis, even if you lose data because of a system failure. Service Level Agreement, is the fine print. And I have seen clients independently decide to insert the same tape over and over again, eventually destroying the tape in the process … along with the only recent copy of their data. I have run into companies that cycled through media every day without checking the resulting logs, only to find out when they need the backup that it hasn’t been working for years. Even after all the years I have spent dealing with these issues, I am still surprised when I find out that somebody isn’t managing this process properly. Local backups require proper management to make sure that data is being backed up and the resulting backups are usable.

An online backup through a third party.An offsite backup server where vital data is synchronized in real-time or regularly restored.Local onsite physical backup via NAS, tapes or external hard drives.Based on our experience with disaster recovery, I prefer to see no less than three methods performed by independent parties, but managed by senior IT staff or a consultant who can attest to their veracity: We prefer to use VaultLogix for many of our clients due to the sophistication of their software, which has versatile features such as Exchange message level backup and restore capabilities.Įven if you feel that you already have a reliable backup in place, we recommend multiple methods. Assuming you have 8 gb of data, an online backup could cost as little as $4 per month or as much as $100 per month, depending on the vendor. It would be inconvenient, but you would be able to get by until your other systems could be fully recovered.Ĭost should be a non-issue here. Now imagine losing all of your data, except your portfolio accounting system data and your access to your email. Given our experience with many Axys users, I suspect that most clients’ entire Axys system takes less than 2 gb. Axys, one of the most critical systems for many investment advisors, is an excellent example because the files typically don’t take that much space.

Though a company may regularly back up a few hundred gigabytes of data daily, it likely needs a small fraction of that data to function.įor example, imagine losing everything – including your portfolio accounting system data – and trying to service your clients. In our first-hand experience with clients faced with recovering from a disaster, the only files immediately required are those used in day-to-day operations. Lazy backup methodologies that capture everything can make recovery more time consuming and potentially problematic.

In real-life scenarios, it is surprising just how little data is absolutely critical.
#Mozypro limits Pc
Just because your latest PC has room for over 1 terabyte (tb) of data doesn’t mean it all needs to be backed up. The data stored on systems, both personally and professionally, has mushroomed, making it all too easy to lose track of what is truly important. Today, you can store 32 gigabytes (gb) on something the size of a quarter for $45. Believe it or not, ten megabyte (mb) drives used to approach the size of cinder blocks and cost $4,500. In the past three decades, hard drive capacities have managed to grow exponentially, while somehow becoming smaller than ever. Furthermore, in order to deter would-be hackers from accessing it, the data needs to be stored in an encrypted format. I have a plethora of backups for personal and business reasons, but I’m still concerned that everything may not be backed up and organized as it should be to ensure a speedy recovery of critical data in the wake of a true disaster.
