How much is your data worth? If you are a customer of T-Mobile using their Sidekick mobile device, all your personal data, pictures, contacts, emails, calendars, etc., which you had stored with them is worth one month’s service plan fees.

So, do you agree? Well, that’s what T-Mobile is offering users who lost all their data when the Microsoft/Danger network crashed earlier this month, without an adequate backup in place. Unrecoverable is the word they are using.

Now, here is the question every single one of you have to ask yourselves: “In case of a disaster/crash/hack, is my business’ data backed up and recoverable?”

Really now, think hard. If this can happen to mobile phone data, it can happen to your business’ vital records. If all your data…your accounting, your payroll, your invoicing, AR/AP, customer records, serial numbers, inventory, development plans, R&D reports, whatever, was lost, unrecoverable, would your business survive? And if it could survive, what would it cost you in money, time, cash, personnel resources, capital resources, lost customers, investment, fulfillment delays, dividends, tax inquiries, profits, and money to recreate those records, or blindly grope ahead without them? More or less than one month’s service fee do you suppose?

Those of us who started in computers with punch cards (“what are those?” some of you ask) and aged along with mainframes and Apple IIs, floppy disks and LANS have always been conscious of the need for data backup. Always, that is, since our first hard drive got reformatted at the repair shop who promised us we didn’t need to do a tape-drive backup.

The worlds of speculative fiction have, for years, been full of stories imagining and describing the dire consequences of data loss. It could be political opponents, war, criminals, business competitors, presonal enemies, preteen hackers, spies, hurricanes, earthquakes, solar flares, nuclear-powered satellites exploding, or even aliens that cause the data-loss crisis. Unlike books, TV and movies, though, the heroes (you and your business) won’t suddenly be saved by the deus ex machina in the last 3 minutes … unless, that is, you’ve already invested the resources of time and money into data backup.

Cloud computing, wireless access anywhere, online applications and remote-server-hosted data can certainly be a boon to business, but this foul-up clearly displays the hazards inherent in having your data stored elsewhere.

Understand this! Once you hand over your data to someone else, it is no longer exclusively yours.

There is no possible guarantee that your vital records won’t be, with evil intent, hacked, perused, copied and sold, simply stolen, corrupted or, by accident, just plain lost, deleted, or unrecoverable. Each technological generation becomes enamored of the possibilities and capabilities of the gizmos we invent. We can’t help it. It is, then, up to we geezers, ancients, oldsters and curmudgeons to holler:

“HEY! Pay attention! It is going to break! There are going to be screwups! Someone is going to mess with it! Watch out! Protect yourself now!” “We know this because it happened to us!”

So, if you’ve embraced the-sky-is-the-limit cloud computing, you owe it to your business and its survival to buy some information insurance, as it were, and back up all your data locally, and frequently. This doesn’t have to be on-site necessarily, but out of the clouds and firmly on the ground. Because, really, seriously, once your data is gone, the likelihood of successful disaster recovery is mighty slim. You are S-O-L.

Steve Lange
Senior Editor, and Oldster who’s lost data before
Palo Alto Software

If you’re involved with a web business, are you on the cloud yet? Consider this comment from a partner at Union Ventures. This is Albert Wenger on his blog Continuations:

All of this is great news for startups because it is further driving down the cost of hosting.  At this point I am encouraging everyone who is starting up to write for the cloud from Day One.  In fact, I think it is time to be somewhat suspect of a technical team that is not doing that.

I’m not that involved in the IT and all at Palo Alto Software anymore, but I do know that our Email Center Pro and all of our main websites are up on the Amazon cloud now. The team tells me that it’s a huge improvement in performance, at a lower cost, with a lot more peace of mind.

Seems like startups and smaller companies can’t afford not to.

I was in San Francisco two weeks ago for Office 2.0 conference. The effort was the third installment of Ismael Gahlimi’s pledge to bring together leading minds in the Web 2.0 space for a 3-day discussion about moving the duties associated with work off of the hard drive and onto the Internet — exclusively.

That means all of it, from data storage to accounting, and everything in between. It’s a radical shift in concept. Moving all of a business’ operations into “the clouds” gives pause to some (data security junkies) and brings smiles to others (whomever might be concerned about the bottom line).

Whatever your feeling about moving organizational functionality into a hosted state, the fact that it’s gaining momentum is impossible to deny.

Thankfully for those of you who need to use email (please don’t overlook the sarcasm there), Email Center Pro is a product with its eye on “the clouds”. And that’s probably one reason I felt so at ease while scrolling through the demo booths last week in San Francisco. Yes, there were plenty of cool applications on display. But were any of them attempting to do to email what we are? No, not that I could tell.

With a rich feature set that’s only sweetening as we approach the public release of version 2, it was nice to see that Email Center Pro might be standing in the gap between the obligation of email and the genuine usability of a collaborative tool.

Jason Gallic
Product Marketing Manager