Team Scores with Data Handoff

Risky Business?

On the surface, it appears that the franchise is taking a radical risk, allowing a service provider (in another state, no less) to handle the storage and archiving of the crown jewels of any company's operation: its business data.

"Of course, its a little bit of a risk," Bill Jankowski, senior director of IT for the Ravens, told eWEEK. "After all, the data is in someone else's hands, not ours. But they know exactly how to handle digital data; they handle data every day for a lot of customers. And for the last few months, we haven't had any problems to speak of, so ... so far, so good."

Its true that none of that digital data is physically housed in the Ravens headquarters in Owings Mills, Md., where the team maintains its executive offices and practice facility.

But nothing has changed for the people who work with the data every day. Each evening after the close of business, all new information that came into the Ravens office during the previous 24 hours is backed up through the AmeriVault system at one of the company's server farms, which are under 24-hour high security.

"Dealing with tape backup and archiving was time-consuming and resource-intensive," Jankowski said. "It was just really slow going trying to find a document or e-mail from the past, while waiting for the right spot in the archive tape to come up. This way, the retrieval process is much quicker, almost instantaneous, because everything is housed on disk, not tape."

Read more here about secure tape backup options.

A recent survey by Rob Stevenson of The InfoPro, in New York, found that nearly 20 percent of Fortune 1000 companies outsource at least some portion of their daily storage load. Forty-two percent of survey respondents outsource e-mail archiving, and about 30 percent outsource daily backup files. A year ago, these numbers were in the single digits.

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