Business Continuity; The Modern Day Backup Strategy.
Let me paint a picture for you...
Your business is humming along and all of a sudden your server crashes. You no longer have access to your information, and can no longer respond to customer requests. You're taking messages and will get back to clients once it's fixed; meanwhile your clients are shopping elsewhere to see if they can get a faster response, because, after all... their business can't afford to be down either.
You send an SOS to your IT team; they send someone out to your site immediately to have a look at the problem. It only takes them 30 minutes to arrive. Upon arrival they discover it's a worst case scenario, this isn't just a quick fix... not just a bad hard drive, or a bad stick of ram... No. It's your server's motherboard. Your server is 6 years old, finding a replacement isn't going to be easy and this complicates restoring your backup as well. Many IT firms will wind up re-installing and configuring the operating system, but first they need to find you new hardware. If you're lucky, your IT guy has a brand new server in the back seat of his car (not terribly likely, but it could happen...) however, even this means you'll be down for at least a day while he puts it all together and restores your backup. If you have a few applications running on your server... an ERP system and a CRM system... it could be two days, while he liaises with the software consultants to get it all back up and running again.
How much did this downtime just cost you? All of your employees have been sitting around twiddling their thumbs... taking messages, explaining to clients that your systems are down and promising to call them back as soon as things come back up again. Clients may have sent their business elsewhere.
However, if you combine your backups with a technology like Virtualization, a cloud based platform, this little scenario of ours changes drastically. This time when you call your IT support team, they assure you that your backup systems are in place, a virtual copy of your server is spinning up in the cloud as you speak. Your systems will be restored, with minimal data loss, in 20 minutes. Things may be a little slower than usual, limited by your internet connection, but you are up and conducting business as usual, until the new server can be installed.
This is what we call Business Continuity.
If Business Continuity sounds like a great fit for your business. Give us a call at 587-400-9573, or email us at helpdesk@bracer.ca, and we will be happy to discuss an implementation plan that works for you. Visit our google business page here.