Are you willing to bet your business on it?

OK it’s October already and the Halloween decorations are popping up everywhere. TV will be featuring all the movies to scare the %$#@ out of the kids and give us nightmares (especially my wife). But let’s talk about some REAL nightmares (warning! These pictures are graphic!)

With local storms like Irene and Lee in recent months these pictures aren’t far fetched, and fire can hit anybody. On top of that, don’t forget about the risks of theft, vandalism, unhappy employees or just plain old equipment breaking.

Here’s some scary statistics:

• 93% of companies that lost their data center for 10 days or more due to a disaster filed for bankruptcy within one year of the disaster. 50% of businesses that found themselves without data management for this same time period filed for bankruptcy immediately. (National Archives & Records Administration in Washington)
• 60% of companies that lose their data will shut down within 6 months of the disaster.
• 34% of companies fail to test their tape backups, and of those that do, 77% have found tape back-up failures.

Getting a little nervous yet?

Like it or not, over the past years all of your business information – customer information, accounting, sales, etc has become ones and zeros stored inside black boxes (if it’s not a black box you really need to update). This has really boosted your productivity but now brings some issues to bear that you better have good answers for, like:

• What if you have fire or floods or other environmental disasters?
• What if someone breaks in and steals your equipment?
• What if you get hacked or an unhappy employee acts out?

If you have a plan/solution that considers and deals with these issues and you’ve TESTED it and it works, good for you! You will probably get a good night’s sleep tonight.

Maybe you have tapes that you backup with and keep one or two offsite. Maybe you’ve upgraded the tapes to external hard drives and swap them out every week or two. Maybe you sometimes forget to take it offsite. Have you looked to make sure the information was successfully copied to the tape or drive – are you SURE it’s good? Are you sure all of the information that is created in your office is getting on to those disks and tapes?

Systems Support Corp has been working with businesses for over 22 years and we’ve seen a number of situations like these – environment damage, no backups, etc. But the most painful ones were where the client thought they were backing up and doing the right things, but for whichever reason (and there are LOTS of them) the data just was not there or was not in useable condition when it came time to put it back. The process was never tested when everything was still running well. How can you test without bringing everyone’s system down, and what if that test fails?

There is a happy ending to this, though. Now that most businesses have high speed internet, and a new technology called virtualization has been developed, we are proud to announce that we have partnered with the company that we think has the best solution to these issues. We call our solution ReliaNet BDR and it not only addresses these issues but adds some great features as well. All at an affordable price – really.

ReliaNet BDR will:

Back up your servers completely and continuously and verify the backup – every night. It will send an encrypted copy of the backup to three different secure and certified data centers located in different areas of the country, secure from regional events like hurricanes, etc. Once a file is backed up it will be there – even months/years after you delete it on your server.

Now here’s the really cool part –
With Virtualization technology if your server crashes, the local ReliaNet BDR appliance will become the server with your data and everything on it, running and looking just like your server. Repair or replace your crashed server and the ReliaNet BDR will bring that one up to date and hand it off back to the repaired/replaced server.

It gets better –
If your whole site is damaged or down for whatever reason, that same technology will virtualize the server (or servers) at one of those data centers so you can run your servers over the internet to wherever you are – again, running and looking just like your server.

And better yet –
So many backup plans fail because they weren’t tested. With ReliaNet BDR you can “turn on” your virtualized server, look at all the files, run your programs and verify them without taking your “real” servers offline or kicking anybody off their system. A complete test without having to stop business.

And better still –
If you get a new program and/or an update and you want to make sure it won’t crash a server that can’t be down – again turn on your virtual server, install or update that program and check it out. If it looks ok update your “real” server. How cool is that?

The best news is that this technology is now available to small and mid- size businesses at an affordable, monthly fee. Like the cliché says “you really can’t afford not to”. How about a Relianet BDR with all the features described that can handle up to 3 servers and 100gb of data for under $10/day? You can add more data and more servers as needed or as you grow. No boxes to buy, no tapes to keep track of.

Contact us as soon as you can, before anything happens. For the earliest responders, we can let you try out one as an evaluation. You can call us at 781.837.0069, or email info@systemsupport.com.

Try to get a good night’s sleep and Happy Halloween!

Regards,

Brian MacFee
President, Systems Support Corp
bmacfee@systemsupport.com