Marie Cooley became enraged earlier this year when she browsed the local paper and spotted a job listing at the architectural firm at which she worked.
It was her job description to a T. She figured she was about to get fired when she reported to work on Monday at Steven E. Hutchins Architects.
Instead, she decided to make a pre-emptive strike. Furious, she drove to work, let herself in and started deleting files. All of them.
Some seven years of work at the Jacksonville, Fla., company, including client files, drawings and other data worth about $2.5 million, went into cyberspace.
The bigger issue when her handiwork was discovered wasn't who to blame - Cooley was promptly arrested and charged - but that the company had no backup and had to call in the expertise of a disaster data-recovery company. The files were restored - but it was costly and time consuming, not to mention nerve- wracking.
Failing to make backups is not uncommon in small businesses. With few resources and demands of their enterprise pulling them in several directions at once, it's all too easy to opt for simplistic solutions.
The guy in the office who is handy with computers becomes the IT guy in addition to his regular job as an account manager. Your cousin down the road ends up as a network consultant.
"Small businesses are a harder sell than medium or large clients," says Dave Botterill, COO of a Mainland Information Systems, Calgary corporate data-protection service provider. "Even at 100 employees, they don't really understand the value."
What it takes is a crisis that serves as a wakeup call and John Hendriks knows it all too well.
His small business, Hello Anywhere, rents mobile phones to major events and travellers across Canada. In the early years, Hendriks was more worried about the million and one details that kept his operations going than his computer system.
Then a car hit a power pole on his street and the surge fried his computer. A couple of years later, a virus started deleting files from his screen right before his eyes - all he could do was reach over and unplug his machine.
The virus hadn't as much deleted the 6,000 files, but renamed them and put them in another folder. By then, however, Hendriks, whose Toronto office consists of only three workstations, had hit the wall.
So, he upped his investment in technology and set up a server system in house to back up all his files. Every once in a while he backs up to tapes, which he stores offsite.
But he's still vulnerable since the tape file backups are sporadic. What he should be thinking of is backing up everything on the servers over the internet to an offsite storage location.
"I just don't know because it's not really my business," says Hendriks. "Phones I know. Computers not so much. I had to use a neighbour's printer the other day to print invoices because my driver corrupted and I didn't know how to troubleshoot or fix it. I guess it is really something I should address."
Hendriks is typical of many small businesses.
Even if your business is just a couple of laptops, presumably you'll want to grow it. The data associated with your business, the client records, sale figures, product lists and other information is not just valuable because it tracks who bought what from you, it's also a potential gold mine for future marketing strategies.
Since storage - memory - has become cheap, the trend is not to delete anything, partly because it costs nothing to store it electronically and partly because you never know when something is going to come back and bite you in terms of liability, so you'd better have all the records in place, even years later.
Of course, backing up your laptop's file to another computer or an in-house server is a first step.
But what if that computer gets stolen, fails or gets damaged in a flood or fire? What about the data?
Putting it on CD or DVD isn't much of a plan either since those media are known to fail or "oxidize" and besides, where are you going to store it? In the office? What if there's a fire?
Finally, even the old-school solution of printing off copies and storing documents in boxes comes with its own list of logistical issues: Where will you put them, how will you retrieve them and how long will they last? What happens if the ink fades?
Then there's the privacy issue. If your business collects client information for accounting, legal, insurance and tax preparation, for example, the bar is raised higher because you're responsible for protecting that data from being made public.
A Harris/Decima online survey for Epson Canada suggests that while 78 per cent of small businesses surveyed admitted they are concerned about properly storing business documents, only 17 per cent actually stored them in secure hard- and soft-copy files.
According to the poll, 90 per cent of those who do not store any documents in soft copy say they have not adopted an electronic system to store their important business documents because they believe it is not necessary to do (50 per cent) or they never thought about it (25 per cent) or think it's too expensive (15 per cent).
The remaining 10 per cent admitted they didn't understand the importance of making soft copies of important business documents such as contracts or invoices and storing them electronically.
Obviously, if information technology (IT) is not your core business or expertise, it makes sense to either hire someone, or outsource. Traditionally, SMBs have hired IT consultants or service companies to maintain their systems on an as-needed basis and provide over-the-phone support.
However, that doesn't usually take into account the necessity of backing up data or even hosting data in the long term. Setting up a server room, which must be cooled with a separate system to dissipate the heat generated by the machines, kept secure and serviced by skilled technicians, is another expensive proposition.
There is, however, another option, one the growth of high-speed internet access has created. Offload the problem onto someone else.
For smaller businesses, there are many online backup providers that offer end-to-end encryption of data (the data is scrambled as it leaves your computer and scrambled while in storage so that without your password and "key" no one can look at it), secure remote access and software to painlessly automate the process so you never forget to back up.
Larger companies with more data outsource the task to larger companies, such as Mainland, which is a reseller for EMC2, a giant player in the space, or companies such as Hewlett-Packard and IBM Canada, which are also dominant players.
HP just announced its intent to buy EDS, a data-centre player, suggesting it sees growth in this end of the business.
Running a cost-efficient data centre requires deep knowledge. Not only must the hardware and software run seamlessly, the system must also be energy efficient. That's where the big players have the economy of scale small- and mid-sized businesses can't touch.
For many enterprises, being hostage to their technology diverts energy away from their core business, says Greg Gulyas, vice-president business development and outsourcing sales with IBM Canada. So, faced with the prospect of having to invest massive amounts into upgrading their database systems, they often find outsourcing a better option.
"What the CFOs like is that they can pay according to their business volume," says Gulyas, making it a fixed price and eliminating risk, especially with the rapid pace of technology advance, which can mean the hardware you bought yesterday is obsolete by the time it's rolled out.
Aside from hardware and software, however, the "wetware" or human factor also presents a challenge, says Gulyas, with acute skills shortages in super-heated regions of Western Canada.
While such services have thus far been focused on mid- to large-scale enterprises, the downward pressure on hardware and the economies of scale realized by the big players that have billions invested in massive data centres scattered around the globe means they can carve off a chunk of their resources and lease it to smaller businesses at more attractive structured pricing than if the business built its own system.
It's an option small businesses probably won't consider off the top, but as it becomes more affordable - like many other tech services that started as "big guys only" - it will likely trickle down, says Botterill.
(Ian Harvey can be reached at harvey@businessedge.ca)
