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>>;One of my esteemed clients is a small nonprofit organization that is researching the possibility of contracting with a remote online backup service. They have one tech savvy person on staff who is not responsible for the network and server, and a network administration consultant who is not very available to them. The latter's services are donated. I'd love to hear from folks on staff in small nonprofits (not from vendors) about whether you'd endorse the remote backup strategy and why. What can go wrong, and what can go right, with this option?>;>
One of my clients, a lawyer who specializes in environmental advocacy recently asked me the same kind of question after seeing an article on such services in the NYT.
The technology for remote backup should be quite simple to implement right. It is basically just a backup to a compressed file then FTP it to the external location.
What we came up with from his perspective is that the core questions are "what is the providers retention policy, what will remain on backups etc after the stored data is removed from the users point of view? How secure from a confidentiality perspective would that data be? Could a clients data be acquired (court order, FBI request, etc) from the provider when the user or his client would not agree to the release?
With the special requirements for confidentiality placed on a lawyer, we decided not to go that road.
Clif
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Clif Graves Consulting
cgraves%40clifgraves.com">cgraves
clifgraves.com -http://www.clifgraves.com
Phone: 207-512-2522
Serving clients throughout the United States and Canada with:
* NorthStarDb http://www.northstardb.com/
* ebase consulting
* Training, Data conversion
* Management / Work flow consulting
* Custom FileMaker software development
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