Simplify Your Performance Tuning
Stop working so hard to tune. Did you know one of the most effective things you can do to maintain and improve performance is to keep your indexes tuned, defragmented and running well? It’s such a basic step that many times it’s overlooked. Idera has their SQL Defrag tool that will completely automate this for you – just point, click and relax and your indexes will be tuned and ready to go, always. Tune your performance, automatically. Check out SQL Defrag and you’ll see exactly how much of a difference it can make. Get more information here.
Data Security, USB Keys, USB Drives and Backups
Ken wrote in about my comments yesterday about the article I’d seen about copying your data to external keys (or backing up to them). He wrote:
"The issue of data security is important, but unfortunately the issue of backup and recovery are getting overlooked. In a lot of cases there is little guidance or support for backup and recovery of critical data – the data you need to do your job. Email systems are sometimes limited in what they can store and retrieving that one critical Email from 4-6 months ago or that file attachment from last years project. Cost containment means smaller more limited PC’s – with smaller hard drives. Manuals are no longer hard copy, but electronic.
While Personally Identifiable information – Health, Salary, Identity (Drivers License, SSN, etc.) needs to be protected, encrypted etc. a lot of information gets lumped under "Critical" just because. If people did not backup their own data I’m not sure anyone else would and no one is going to be too sympathetic to your cries of dismay as to why you were late delivering a system or providing critical support – "My PC Broke" falls under the same category today as "My dog ate my home work" did a long time ago. You paint one side of the issue – protect your data, but you miss the bigger issue of overall data management and providing "tiered" protection.
Also, it’s not that hard to password protect or encrypt portable data (look at the WD Passport drives using (DMailer / WD -Sync). It may not be the "best" protection, but it’s not bad – the key is to make it easy and painless not just to backup the data, but to encrypt it. One way or another people are going to protect the data they need to do their jobs."
True, all true. My issue with this particular article was the suggestion that moving data to the USB key was somehow better (in addition to being so much more convenient) than having it on the native system. While this consultant is suggesting that this is a great solution to having your data with you all the time, they’ve negated the positive effect of backing up to the key or USB drive by using that as the single source/only source of the data. Add to that the fact that it’s not encrypted or protected beyond "take it with you and put it in a safe place"-type suggestions and it gets pretty dicey.
It’s actually more dangerous than having the data on the system and not backed up – after all, misplace that key, drop that drive that you’ll be carrying around or … well, you get the idea … and you’ll be facing a really tough situation.
That was really my point. That only half of the solution was being presented – it just moved from one half to the other. Hopefully a complete picture can be presented to people and we can start helping people understand that a single location is a bad thing, that unprotected information is a bad thing (especially critically private information) and that both issues need to be addressed.
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