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This week, WebHostingTalk suffered a major compromise and “the offsite backup, the onsite backup and the operational data were destroyed by the attacker.” Read the companies thread about the event here.

This isn’t a news blog. I’m not so plugged in that I can write about things as they happen. That’s not my impetus. My impetus is to publish articles about ideas that I believe are sound principles when planning your systems architecture. One such principle is not betting the house on a single technology, and WHT was a prime example of the benefits of such planning. After suffering an attack like that, WHT is online and serving traffic. How? They had DVD backups. Try erasing that. Yes, they’ve only managed to restore up to October 2008, and that was likely a result of corrupted media or backup operator error, but their site isn’t down. It’s an arduous process, writing to permanent media. And it’s an arduous process restoring from it. But in a last-ditch scenario like this, it served WHT well. And it proves my point. Crossing architectural boundaries when backing up data is a necessity, and that means keeping at least one form of backup offline.

Would your business be able to take a hit like WHT’s and keep its doors open?

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 24th, 2009 at 16:13 by jim and is filed under Infrastructure, Security. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.