Following a heavier than usual snow storm yesterday, Santa lost power to his Lapland headquarters and several servers crashed. Unfortunately that resulted in the corruption of a database holding the names, addresses and Christmas wishes of millions of children. Upon attempting to restore the data, Santa’s back-up tape failed, leaving him with no other option to restore the database.
In a statement, Santa issued the following apology “I’m ashamed to say that this was a predictable event – snow storms happen all the time in Lapland and this time it’s resulted in me losing millions of Christmas wishes. My elves have been working hard for the past 11 months to build the best in technology, games and cuddly toys. I have not only let them down, I’ve let myself down and worst of all, I have let the children down.”
He continued “Although my apology will not make up for the despair of children who wake up to an empty stocking on Christmas day, I want to assure all those affected that I’m urgently reviewing our data backup policies. Santa Claus Enterprises will not allow this to happen again.”
Although Santa’s data incident may be fictional, the potential for a similar data loss during the Christmas period is very real for companies around the world.
Eoin Blacklock, Managing Director of online backup company KeepItSafe commented “Businesses need to wise up to protecting their mission critical data over the Christmas period and ensure they are not relying on out dated or insecure technologies and manual processes. It is a period when offices close for long periods of time, employees are in and out at irregular intervals and, just like Santa’s experience, the weather can also play havoc. This often leads to data backups falling by the wayside, unforeseen downtime and the potential for data loss when a restore fails.”
With a staggering 90 percent of companies going out of business within two years following a major data loss incident, according to the London Chamber of Commerce, Blacklock asks, “What if you do suffer a Christmas data loss? In those circumstances you need to be confident that the data was backed up in the first place and that critical data can be restored quickly and reliably. Manual backup to tape, still the most common strategy, can make that difficult to achieve at best and impossible at worst. It makes much more sense to automate the process with a reliable online backup partner.”
KeepItSafe is encouraging any businesses concerned by the potential for data loss over the Christmas period to email them at SantaLostMyList@keepitsafe.com.
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