Submerged Lands 2008

Many businesses are encouraging their employees to store all of their documents and files on a virtual hard drive on a secure server that gets automatically backed up every night. That works great as long as the employee is in the office or has access to an internet line for Virtual Private Network (VPN) access, but when an employee is on the road it can be problematic.

It takes a little extra preparation before the trip. First the employee has to copy every document they might need from the company server before they leave the office. This includes not only projects on which they are currently working, but also any document they might need to reference while they are away. This isn’t terribly difficult, but it is something else to remember when preparing to leave the office for any extended period of time. The flip side of that equation is that any changes or updates made to the files while in the field must be saved back to the server when the employee returns to the office, or connects through VPN from the hotel room in the evening. Presentations for off-site sales meetings or trade shows frequently fall into this category.

If the employee frequently works from home, then they almost certainly have VPN software that allows them to access the files directly on the corporate server from their home. Any changes to the files are immediately saved back to that location as well. That’s fine as long as the employee has a fast internet connection at home. If, however, they live out in the country, they may experience restricted bandwidth due to other local traffic especially with a cable modem. This can make working over a VPN an exasperating test of perseverance.

The goal of using these virtual drives is to prevent data loss that results when a hard drive fails, and every hard drive will fail eventually if you use it long enough. Loss of important documents and files can make a substantial impact to productivity. The employee would either need to recreate the files if they can, or have the defective hard drive out for data recovery. Data recovery services are not expensive in the scheme of things, but they do take time during which the files or data from the corrupted drive are unavailable. In today’s fast paced business world, that time can often equal lost opportunity.

Getting the data back with the aid of a data recovery service a couple weeks after the drive failed is still a valuable service, but, of course, is no substitute for the near instant recovery afforded by using server based storage systems for the files in the first place.

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