How good are your backups? Do you test and monitor your backups or just leave them up to luck?

If your server suddenly crashed and ALL your
data was erased, how long would it take before
your business was back up and running as usual?

If you aren’t sure, or if you think it would only be a short period of time, read on. Below are 3 common, costly misunderstandings most business owners have about their data backup that give them a false sense of security:

Misunderstanding #1: Believing That Tape Backups Are A Reliable Way To Secure Your Data...Wrong! Tape backups have an average failure rate of 100% (no, that’s not a typo). What makes this even worse is that tape backups will APPEAR to be working, giving you a false sense of security.

Misunderstanding #2: Relying On An Inexpensive, Automated Online Backup Provider To Backup Your Company Data. Tread carefully here and make sure that you’ve really done your homework on your chosen solution.

Here are a few questions to ask of any offsite backup provider before you trust your company data with them:

1.  Ask if you have the option to have your initial backup performed through a hard copy. With the amount of data on most company’s servers, an initial backup performed over the web can take months to complete.
2. Make sure that database files can be stored and recovered easily. Many cheap online backup services only hold simple office or media files, while ignoring your most important database files or making those incredibly difficult to recover.
3. Demand daily status reports. Any reputable backup service will send you a daily e-mail to verify that everything is backed up. The more professional solutions will allow you to notify more than 1 person (like your IT guy) in addition to yourself.

Misunderstanding #3: Trusting Their Backup Is Automatically Working Without Doing Periodic Test Restores. I see this happening a LOT – a business owner thinks their backups are working because they don’t see any error messages or apparent problems. Then, when they need to restore a file (or their entire server), they discover the backups stopped working MONTHS ago and all that data is gone.

Luck Is For Leprechauns...It Is NOT A Good Strategy When It Comes To Backing Up Your Data!

Contact us today and we'll help make sure you have a good backup system in place that will not only protect your data but provide you with a high level of business continuity.

5 Quick New Year’s Tech Resolutions You Can Keep!

1. Maintenance Plan: Implement a maintenance plan for your computers to ensure they are updated regularly and receive security patches
2. Backup/Disaster Recovery: Make sure you have a good backup system in place that makes sense for your business.  Whatever solution you choose should create off site backups as well as imaged based backups to provide you with faster restore times.
3. Hardware Upgrade Plan: Create an upgrade plan for your older machines.  It’s much better to replace technology on your terms rather than when a disaster strikes due to hardware failure.  Planning your technology upgrades not only helps you reduce downtime and lost productivity, but you can also stagger the upgrades which makes it easier to budget.
4. Antivirus Software: Get a good antivirus program and install it on all of the computers and servers on your network.  Protecting your client and corporate data is not something that you should skimp on.
5. Enterprise Firewall:  Don’t have a good firewall? Get one.  Have an old firewall? Replace it. Just bought a firewall last year, make sure you have purchased any advanced security licenses for the firewall to ensure you are the best protection it can provide. 

Are you feeling lucky?

Do you perform daily backups of your data?  Do you check your backup system to make sure it's actually backing up the data?  Do you practice restoring data from your backup system to make sure you can actually recover your data?

If you answered "No" to any of these questions you must be one lucky person. What happens when your luck runs out?  How will you continue to run your business without any of your critical data on customers and business operations? Implementing a backup solution can be a fairly simple process.  There are so many options available that provide you an easy way to schedule routine backups both onsite and offsite.  With storage costs so low it's easy to backup all of your data or create a system image of your entire system.  A system image is a backup file that allows you to restore not only your data but your entire computer operating system, settings, and applications at once.  They are extremely handy when your hard drive fails and you need to replace it.  

When determining the type of backup system you need, you must consider off site backups.  Creating a backup off site gives you business continuity.  If you only store backups in your office and the building burns down you still lose everything.  Utilizing cloud backup solutions provide companies with off site protection for relatively low costs. 

Getting your backup system in place is only the first step...once it's up and running you need to make sure you have a maintenance plan in place to ensure it's functioning properly and you can actually recover your data when you need it. If you have been relying on luck as your backup system, call us today and we'll make sure your data and your business are protected before your luck runs out.

Business Continuity – Working with Snow

Do you have a business continuity plan?  Does your current technology allow for continued operations, not only if disaster strikes, but also, if your office location is inaccessible?  With the snow storm that just hit the York and Baltimore areas people spent days digging out.  It was impossible to travel on the roads that were covered with 2 feet of snow which meant people could not get to work.  

Shoveling over 2 feet of snow is never fun!

Having the ability to work remotely by securely connecting into your office from another location not only increases productivity but also ensures business continuity.  There are many different options for accessing your corporate information remotely.  Some businesses have moved their information into the cloud which allows access to company data from anywhere.  Others have the ability to securely connect to their office networks utilizing a virtual private network (VPN) which grants them access to company data as well as their office workstations.  

What is your setup like today?  You may want to reevaluate your current infrastructure to ensure you have access to your data and systems whenever and wherever you are working.