Case Studies

In this business, you see some crazy things.

The reality is, just a few years ago, taking a hard drive home didn’t seem that outrageous…today your business could get shut down for this.

See if any of the real world cases, sound a bit too familiar…

Flooded office – Atlanta 2009.  4 days of steady rain soak the ground of a parched Atlanta.  Then the downpours begin.  As the ground is now fully saturated, the pouring rain has no where to go.  Flooding occurs in Atlanta, where just the previous year a lack of rain brought the lakes to record low levels.  Who would have thought it would flood?  This medical office had a reasonable backup process.  The problem is it was entirely on site.  The 3 foot high flood water not only ruined all of the computers, but the backup tapes were floating in the water.

Fire at Office – This scenario will send chills up your spine.  Pull up in the early morning to your office, only to see fire engines.  The flames are out, but what remains of your office building is a skeleton frame and smoldering aches.  Nothing inside survived.  No one was hurt, but the business now had to start all over again.  If they had off site backup, they could stand up new computers and begin generating income right away.

Broken tape backup – A law firm felt they had things under control.  The have a tape backup drive on their server.  One of the attorneys grabs a tape, most day, and takes it home.  The only problem is the tape drive hadn’t been working for 3 months.  There was no indication of this until the office  was struck by a computer virus.  When they tried to restore from the tape backup, there was nothing there.  CompliantBackup constantly monitors the status of your backup, ensuring that the system is running.

Cooked backup device – This office had a slick backup device that backed up each computer each night automatically.  Once day the office redecorated and somebody moved the backup device into an un-ventilated cabinet.  Within a month the device overheated and stopped working, giving no warning.  When an employee “accidentally” deleted all of the quickbook files, they needed to restore the backup.  It had been 3 months since the last good backup.

Employee take home equipment – A medical office has a system of 5 external hard drives.  Each day an employee was to swap out the hard drives and take one home.  What this employee and the office did not realize was by giving this employee a hard drive containing PHI for every patient this office had seen, they were in complete violation of Federal HIPAA regulations.  Additionally, had this employee been robbed or lost the hard drive, every patient that could have been on that hard drive would have to be notified by the office that their personal data had been lost—a complete embarrassment and something that should not have been put on that employee.

Laptop in the oven – this financial office tried to keep their data centralized on the owners laptop.  To protect the laptop each night, the owner would place the laptop in the oven of the office kitchenette. 

Thumb drive – in an honest attempt to ensure their data was backed up, a law office plugged a “thumb drive” into their main computer.  Each day their data is copied to this thumb drive.  Two major problems: it is not off site, and anyone can walk by and easily grab the thumb drive, thereby having all the law practice information.

Crashed hard drive – Hard drive crash, no backup at all.  Enough important information was on this hard drive: forms, notes, financials, that the hard drive was send to a clean room specialist where it cost $500 just for the hard drive to enter the room.  $3400 and two weeks later, the data was recovered.