How prepared is your business to lose a server or two? Sure, late night, upgrade gone south, too much caffeine – we’ve all thought about ripping the cables out of the server and run screaming from the building due to the stress of not being functioning when everyone starts streaming into the office in a few hours. Or was that just me?
The dread of rebuilding servers from a file backup – or worse, from the cloud copy due to a building issue haunted me for a long time. At least it’s not tape backups anymore. Thank goodness technology progresses!
Now, we have disaster recovery (DR) appliances. You NEED to be using these instead of file + cloud solutions. These appliances snapshot servers multiple times a day with no noticeable network performance hit. Let me say that again…full backups without bringing your network to a crawl.
Our appliances immediately test the backups by spinning up a virtual copy to verify it will boot. At the end of the day, it will compress the snapshots and then upload to the cloud. Virtual copies of the servers can be spun up in as little as 2 minutes if you have a full hardware failure and run directly off of the appliance. When your server room floods (because it’s next to/below the bathroom, right?), you can spin up your entire set of servers in the cloud and have your entire staff work via VPN…within an hour.
If that isn’t enough, it also scans backups for signs of infections of virus or ransomware so you know which backup version to restore without ever having to start up a VM and look around yourself. It also has completely separate security so logging into the server doesn’t give a hacker direct access to your backup device and cloud storage to just delete your backups.
True Story – I recently demoed this solution to a large law firm that had recently undergone a significant ransomware attack. They had onsite file + cloud backups through their MSP. Ransomware blew through their antivirus and took out 3 of their servers. The MSP took 8 days…EIGHT DAYS to get their servers fully operational. In our demo, they asked about downtime to true-up the virtual with the recovered hardware. We told them about 15 minutes of downtime. Then we showed them. For the next hour, their administrator and director of IT kept mumbling “15 minutes” and shaking their head. We were also 15% less expensive than their previous monthly service cost.
Even if our solution was 15% more expensive (as it often works out to be if your IT company isn’t gouging you), how much do you lose with EIGHT DAYS of downtime! Or eight hours? Maybe their old MSP folks ran screaming from the building for a few days?
Visit our – Disaster Recovery Solutions
About Advanced Computer Technology
ACT is a managed service provider (MSP) that services small businesses and medium businesses in the southwestern states. Since 2001, ACT has put customers first and worked to bring enterprise technology and standards to medium and small business. Feel free to share our post with your IT company to get yourselves protected or contact our company and we will be happy to speak with you.
About Nick Utiger
Nick is a Network Architect for medium-sized corporate networks. Nick started in small business and stayed with the clients as they grow into larger multi-location/state entities. I am a former MSP, ISP and ITSP owner that has found a great home with ACT. Aside from network design, I have the pleasure of providing some customer relations, act as the licensee for the company’s contractor license, provide low-voltage construction consulting and am the occasional vCIO. I have been known to run screaming from a building, only to trudge back and finish the job.
