Got your Back-Up?
The Arslanian Brothers had a business built on 48 years of reputation. On May 14 it went up in smoke in a couple of hours. The fire destroyed paper files, computer records and even melted the electronics records stored in a fireproof safe.
And so at the end of the day, they did not know what clients were scheduled for cleanings or what rugs they had at the warehouse at the time of the fire. They lost everything.
It's a horrible circumstance that no business wants to face. The truth is that with a little bit of planning, the back-up systems could have shortened the recovery time of getting back to business.
Let's talk back-up systems. Here are the options:
1. Do nothing.
The cost and risk is obvious.
2. Save to tape and take it offsite.
This is an adequate solution that requires physical offsite storage. The tapes are small, easily transported but are an easy target for theft or damage. Plus, if the files are not encrypted, your entire business can walk out the front door in someone's briefcase or hang bag.
3. Save to hard disk.
Like tape, this is a solution that requires physical management of back-up files and presents the same security/theft issues. That means a designated employee or a service company will need to take the data offsite for storage (if that is even being done).
4. Remote online back-up offsite.
This is the cleanest solution. It is a hands free, automatic program capable of protecting your business from disaster. It offers near real-time data back-up for servers, laptops and PCs. It is reliable, maintains data integrity and increases security by eliminating the human error. It encrypts the data from pre-back-up while crossing the Internet and when stored on remote servers. Like I said, it is clean.
If you are interested in learning more about this, take a look at the following links. In the list I have included some of the news stories about Iron Mountain from a while ago. While Iron Mountain is a fine company, the stories do illustrate how important data management is and at the very least, that data storage should include encryption.
If you are interested, Ashton Technology Solutions does have tapeless, enterprise level data protection available without the enterprise price (that means option #4 and it is affordable). Let me know if you want to talk about it.
Talk to you soon,
Jim
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