When Disaster Strikes

The Two Components of Restoring Productivity

Few events are more frustrating and frightening than technology failure. Unfortunately, no matter how good the equipment is, or how well you maintain it, technology simply won’t last forever – just like a car. The only upside to these technology nightmares is that they are easy to mitigate with pre-planning. It’s like finding yourself on the side of the road, stranded with a flat tire and late to your daughter’s wedding. You can either hitchhike for miles to the nearest service station and pray a tow truck can reach you in time, or you can bring a spare and get yourself back up and running with a few turns of a wrench. With Smooth-IT, you can hit the road knowing we’ve got you covered. Here are the two components that you need to consider:

Most businesses back up (or think they’re backing up) their files regularly. This falls under the realm of data preservation, where you can restore or recover lost, deleted, or corrupted files. This type of backup is extremely important to the functionality of your business, yet over 80% of the businesses we encounter do not proactively monitor their backups as to their status and completion. In short, if you aren’t testing your backups regularly, there’s a good chance they’re not actually working. Mid-disaster is not the time to discover that all of your files and internal data are corrupt.

Smooth-IT offers Managed Backup Services to ensure that your data preservation is monitored, measured, and tested. We keep tabs on your data daily to ensure that the backups are properly completing and that your information is ready if you need to recover it. We’ve got you covered.

Disaster Recovery (also referred to as Business Continuity) is a separate discipline from data preservation. While backups can protect your files and data if the worst should happen, they will not save your whole system – like your server. If your server crashes, it must be re-loaded and re-configured with all of the software, operating system, applications, and settings in order for you to restore and access your backed-up data. Most business do not have a plan in place to salvage this type of disaster, and yet such crashes may halt crucial business functions.

Smooth-IT can help. By reviewing the situation from a business operations perspective, we can work with you to create a plan that keeps you running smooth – without breaking the bank. We take a balanced approach between the costs for solutions in relation to your actual business needs and compliance requirements. This means that if the server is integral to your daily operations and directly tied to profit or productivity, we can advise and implement measures to have you up and running in a single phone call if the server should crash. Or, if the application operates on a non-urgent basis, we can still protect and recover it but at a level and time line that satisfies your budget using sensible solutions.