Zurich Insurance is once again in the limelight for all the wrong reasons. Back in August 2008 the South African arm of the insurance company misplaced an unencrypted backup tape and the incident wasn’t found out by Zurich Insurance for a whole year.

Now, Zurich Insurance has just been handed the largest fine ever given by the Financial Services Authority – a huge £2.28 million. The fine was given after it was revealed that Zurich had lost the personal details of 46,000 customers who could be exposed to burglary and fraud now. After the 2008 incident, Zurich said it highlighted its need for better data security. But it looks as though this fell by the wayside.

Oracle, the global software and hardware company, has announced a new set of features for its StorageTek tape-based data storage solutions. The main improvement in the storage solution is the increase in size of possible systems to 150 petabytes.

The StorageTek SL8500 series has a slot capacity of 100,000 up from 70,000 and it is also capable of storing up to 1.5TB of data. As far as data storage systems go, Oracle has once again put tape storage at the forefront of storage, rather than as just an archival system. In a world of cloud storage and virtualisation, tape can still hold its own.

According to a new survey by IT security company AVG, many people across the UK are using data storage with no backup – in other words, they’re storing valuable data on their PCs with no security and no backup.

About 31% of people in the AVG poll had lost information they couldn’t replace that was stored on their PCs. The main causes of losing data were;
-PC malfunction

-Virus

-Human error

-Computer damage

-Power cut

Looking after your computer, getting the experts in should it malfunction and using antivirus software are all measures that may just save your data.

BlackBerry business mobile users will be pleased to hear that Mimecast, an email management firm, can bypass Microsoft Exchange or the BlackBerry Enterprise Server during an outage. What this means for business mobile users, is that even in a server outage, you can still send and receive email messages!

Peter Bauer, the CEO of Mimecast says, “The service works by sending mails directly from our cloud architecture to users’ devices,” bypassing the servers completely. By hosting messages in the cloud, BlackBerry users will be able to continue with their business no matter what!

Verizon and IBM have gone into partnership to offer a risk management service for cloud-based computing. As simple as it is effective, the service basically makes automatic copies of all business data that you send to the cloud.

Cloud-based computing has gained popularity recently, however it has failed to gain the total trust of the telecoms world. By making copies of all data sent to the cloud, IBM and Verizon are giving companies peace of mind where their data is concerned. With the ‘Managed Data Vault’ service, if something goes wrong in the cloud, customers can retrieve a file, restore a device, or recover from a serious outage. What a way to back up your data!

Toshiba, the phone system manufacturer, has created a new product line aimed at the data storage industry. The new Canvio line features Windows-based NTI BackupNow EZ software.

The Canvio portable hard drive has search capabilities as well as the ability to restore and retrieve and lost files. Toshiba is offering the range of Canvio hard drives in four different data storage capacities ranging from 500GB to 1TB.

Toshiba’s Canvio line is customisable and can provide complete system backup – it also comes in five different colours, to match whatever colour scheme you may happen to have in your office.

Small to medium-sized businesses (SMBs) in the UK are failing abysmally when it comes to backing up their data. This worrying discovery comes after new research from Acronis which surveyed 600 IT managers in SMBs across the UK, France and Germany.

Although just over half of the people surveyed said that data backup was a common occurrence, 19% of respondents didn’t backup their machines at all – which led to a troubling estimate of 60% of company data being held on workstations rather than being backed up.

Compared to France (6%) and Germany (9%), 38% of UK SMB companies aren’t backing up their data. With such poor data backup and recovery practices in place, the UK could be in serious trouble.

Riverbed Technology has announced the release of a new product that will help companies with data storage and archive management. Named the Steelhead 7050, the product range utilises Riverbed’s WAN (Wide Area Network) design to manage data storage and it can be used for the purpose of disaster recovery, archiving and system backups.

One advantage of the Steelhead 7050 range is that it can optimise traffic by using Riverbed’s RiOS operating system – it can also support a 10GB Ethernet card. So far, testing of the storage device has seen throughput speeds boosted by 2Gbps.

With recent news stories about data loss from mobile phones, the public are understandably worried. We all do it – use mobile phones or smartphones to store data that’s important to us whether it’s pictures, messages, work data or contacts. The possibility of losing that data wasn’t a persistent concern until a few high-profile companies did just that. Now, according to new research 33% of people surveyed in the US have said that data loss is a big concern and around 42% of people would consider synchronisation of data between phones and back up as a crucial feature to the making or breaking of a sale. Despite these concerns though, people continue to store increasing amounts of data on their phones – a risky business some might say.

Data loss can occur for many reasons. Hardware failures are as common as they are frustrating and can happen in a number of ways from motherboards failing, to disk drives to software errors. Disasters can also wipe out all of your data whether it’s a natural disaster such as a storm or flood or an act of terrorism. Any way in which it happens, data loss can be catastrophic for your business, losing you money and reputation. Data storage and disaster recovery are the roads to travel to prevent data loss. Data storage can range from deduplication to virtualisation and can be available at all budget ranges. Disaster recovery plans are simply that – a recovery plan for your data if disaster should strike. All companies are susceptible to data loss. The smart thing to do is prepare.