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One of my mentors, Harry Newton, published a monthly magazine about business tele-communications in the 90s. The articles we always turned to first were his "How did I let this happen?!" disaster chronicles. Harry believed in letting others learn from his mistakes. Today I'm sharing a "priceless education" story from our recent history- so you don't have to learn the same way we did.
We run ConnectWise, our "manage everything about you and your company" software on a large name-brand server, for which we pay handsomely for Next Business Day onsite repair. ConnectWise holds everything - contacts, configurations, warranty information, passwords, maintenance histories, open issues, inventory, time tracking, routes - and its the portal customers log into to self-access tickets, invoices, etc. Simply put - we're bombed back to the Stone Age without it. You probably have a similar key system or 2twoin your business.
We back up our data religiously, too. But - data isn't useful without hardware to make it "live".
Our "just in case" solution is a Backup & Disaster Recovery (BDR) server - which snapshots the "real" production servers every hour - and also pushes a current image out to cloud storage. The BDR's golden value us that it can step in right away (in about 5 minutes) to become a virtual incarnation of the "real" servers its backing up - either onsite, or up in the cloud. Our thinking was "if we need to use the BDR for overnight while a service tech and factory parts arrive, that's okay".
Never in my wildest dreams did I think we'd have to run on the BDR for THIRTY THREE long days. But we did. And we'd probably be out of business now if we hadn't been able to rely on our BDR for business continuity.
Meanwhile, the well known, publicly traded server vendor shuffled slowly through an escalating chain of Homer Simpson-like interventions -- which required 33 elapsed days, about 10 parts shipments, and endless hours of vendor management before we had a functioning server again.
No names are mentioned - because, sadly, this "you paid for service within a specified time frame, but we have 14 ways of not living up to it" trend seems to extend across many major server manufacturers - especially since 2009. Downsizing and outsourcing in national service organizations trades your risk for their margin. SynerTel's business continued "as normal" all through this tragi-comedy of errors - ONLY because we were able to rely on our BDR!
Bottom line - the BDR is the best piece of business continuity insurance we have. You should have one, too - and using a rental or lease agreement, there's no big up-front cost.
Here's what we're doing to ensure that you don't suffer the same, er, excitement that we did.
LIMITED TIME OFFER:
Any customer who signs a SynerTel BDR agreement by August 3, 2012 will receive
- 25% off the setup cost and
- 10% off the ongoing rental/lease/operating costs
for the entire term of the agreement!
BDR Service starts at $199/month - and usually it reduces other cloud and onsite backup costs - often its almost free.
Don't delay - call us today at 415 746-1801 or email sales@synertel.com to find out how easy (and critical) it is to get a BDR in place protecting your company's operations and cash flow.
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The FBI recently warned travelers of recent upticks in malicious software infecting laptops and smartphones linked to hotel Internet connections.