It’s recently come to light that the IRS has limited to no internal backup and archiving solutions in place for their critical e-mail system. Thousand to tens of thousands of messages were “lost” during a hard drive crash on the agencies internal Exchange server, and their tape backup system utilized a six month rotation on tape media, resulting in a total loss from 2009-2011.
The IRS had apparently contracted with Sonasoft, a company whose catch slogan is “Email Archiving Done Right”. Sonasoft had even tweeted regarding the contract, stating “If the IRS uses Sonasoft products to backup their servers why wouldn’t you choose them to protect your servers?”
Perhaps most troubling, it appears that “employees were responsible for keeping their own long-term archives”, and no formal policy or technology solution was in place to manage this critical system.
Although we’ve recovered many companies lost data from internal server crashes and severe Exchange outages, our number one recommendation is a comprehensive data backup and storage system onsite, partnered with a robust cloud archive. Talk to us about proper tape rotation, secure storage, and cloud solutions today!