Subscribe to CoreVault Online Backup at a Discount
By Jim Calloway, Director, OBA Management Assistance Program

The Oklahoma Bar Association has endorsed Oklahoma-based CoreVault as the official online backup service of the OBA. This action may come as a surprise to some Oklahoma lawyers who could believe that allowing your confidential client data to be transmitted across the Internet and stored on another computer system outside of your control is a breach of client confidentiality. We do not believe this to be the case as long as the service has been properly vetted.

There are always risks in life. Every time a law firm hires a new employee, they accept the risk that that the employee could turn out to be dishonest and embezzle money from the firm or breach some aspect of the attorney-client confidentiality.

The OBA has invested time and resources reviewing the online backup service provided by CoreVault. It has been vetted by the OBA Member Services Committee and the office of the OBA General Counsel. This is not the first time that we have looked at such a service. In fact, we have reviewed options provided by several online data backup service providers over the years.

Our endorsement of CoreVault represents a decision that the risk of not frequently backing up your precious office data and regularly storing it off site far exceeds any risk, or more accurately any perceived risk, of using an online backup service.

CoreVault provides a complete, full service online backup option. When you sign up with CoreVault, their technicians contact you. There is a setup fee. They install their software remotely over the phone and show you how it works. (This is only for high-speed Internet connections. A dial-up connection is not adequate.) You identify all of the files and folders that you wish to have backed up and they will give you an estimate of the monthly charges. You can then lower or increase the amount of data you wish to back up.

Under this arrangement, OBA members receive a significant discount for the monthly cost of online backup. Some of you will believe that the service is somewhat expensive. Others, who have shopped this market, may find that the opposite is true. This is a form of insurance. Just like life insurance, you hope that you will not use it. But this is the way that you manage the business risk of losing all of your data.

You will probably only want to back up your frequently changing data and new data, which include your forms, your completed client, your billing and accounting records, the data from your practice management software and other information that is frequently changed. So you still may want to a monthly backup to a portable hard drive or make a “mirror image” of the hard drive from time to time. Multiple layers of backup are still a good idea, and it is not cost effective to pay for daily backup of the applications or old archived data.

Once you purchase the service from CoreVault, every night (or as frequently as you request) your data will be first encrypted and then automatically transferred over the Internet to the CoreVault Oklahoma City location. Then a duplicate copy of the data will be shipped to its secondary data storage facility located more than 120 miles away from Oklahoma City. You will receive an e-mail confirmation when this is successfully completed. CoreVault receives daily reports on which scheduled backups do not occur. If your data is not backed up for a few days, then they will initiate contact with you to determine whether there is a problem.

Make no mistake. This is an exceptional backup service, protecting your clients and your business continuity.

There are certainly other methods of backing up your data. As long as you are confident that you can restore needed data no matter what disaster befalls you, then you may not require an online backup solution. But increasingly, it appears that daily or every other day backup is the standard. How long would it take you to redo to all of yesterday’s work? And how much revenue would this cost the firm when you make the judgment that you could not bill a client twice for the same work just because you lost the data? Then extrapolate that cost for five days.

If you apply that standard, any online backup service is a bargain.

When did you do your last data backup? Was it last night? Are you sure? Or does your firm back up its data every Friday? Let’s discuss the ramification of your backup frequency.

You have a brief due tomorrow on a very significant case involving a lot of money. It involved a lot of research and hard work – almost full time the last three days. You had to request one extension of time, but you have it done now. Just one more quick review after lunch and you are going to drop it in the mail this afternoon, a day before the deadline.

When you return from lunch and see the firemen and fire trucks outside of your office, you get a bad feeling. When you learn that apparently it was your computer or monitor that caught on fire. It burned for a while before the firemen hosed it down and then tossed it outside into a convenient barrel of rainwater. You are distracted about a number of things from smoke damage to insurance claims. But you soon recall that brief and wonder when the staff last backed up your computer data. Was it last night or last week?

It may be weekly backups are not enough to fully protect your business.

My experience tells me that unless you work in a firm large enough to have dedicated IT staff, it is very challenging to do daily backups and make sure that a copy of the backup is stored off-site to guard against complete destruction of the office. In fact, many firms with dedicated IT staff will find that this solution makes sense and frees their staff to do other important tasks.

A Backup Proposal for Those Who Know That They Aren’t Doing Backup Well was the title of an article I wrote in this space over a year ago. (Oklahoma Bar Journal Nov. 19, 2005 - Vol. 76; No.32.) I am still very proud of this article. It is fairly comprehensive and should be reviewed before making the call to CoreVault so you can consider all of the different types of data that you have. But the article also illustrates that doing a complete backup manually is not easy. Maybe you, too, need to decide whether an automated online service will free up you and your staff for other important tasks.

Carrying a portable hard drive or backup tape home each night for off-site backup is not without its risks either. We see more and more news accounts of corporations who have lost these critical data backups and are then forced to inform their clients that there is the possibility of identity theft. Certainly no law firm would ever want to have to inform its clients that its confidential data had been lost.

In the typical law office, more and more mission-critical data is now located on the office computers and servers. A decade or so ago, the files on a lawyer’s computer were largely word processing forms and completed client work. There might have been some accounting records or other material. But normally, most all of the material could be reconstructed from the printed documents and reports, even if that was expensive.

Now we move forward to a world of digital client files, electronic evidence and electronic discovery. Reconstructing the data in a spreadsheet from a printout would be quite time consuming and prone to errors. For many of you, the idea of receiving an e-mail each morning that your backup was successfully completed the night before may become the most important security blanket and risk management tool that you can imagine.

CoreVault
www.corevault.net
(405) 242-0101
(888) 265-5818

Originally published in the Oklahoma Bar Journal May 12, 2007 - Vol. 78; No.15.