Are you Backing Up Your Business Intelligence?

If you’re a consultant, an employee, or a home user, you probably don’t have specialized Business Intelligence software, but BI is as much of a “must have” in the corporate world as the iPod Nano is among gadget geeks. Computerworld has just published a special report called “Smarter BI: Taking Your Business Intelligence Efforts to the Next Level.” If you want to get into the wonderful world of data mining, you can read the whole report, but what caught my eye was the headline “BI Backup Breach.”

In this article, Jennifer Jones explains that while Business Intelligence software usually includes a backup utility, very few corporations actually use it, and provides guidelines and considerations for Business Intelligence backup. Favorite quote: “The trouble with the backup of BI data is that you are forced to think about it, whereas with transaction data, you aren’t.”

The main difference between backing up BI data and backing up other data (apart from a lack of automation) is the need for consistent naming conventions and data descriptors, without which you’ll only have backed-up chaos.

I did rather like the best practice suggestion of deciding whose head will roll if the backup isn’t done. Of course, we solo entrepreneurs already know the answer to that one: ours.