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Disaster recovery and business continuity planning
is vital to any business, large or small. Backups4All is able to offer
additional services to assist you in the broader protection of your office IT infrastructure
and your data.
Business process models are changing rapidly,
driven by the need to keep up with technology and competitors. Operations that used
to take hours or days can now be executed in minutes or less.
Disaster recovery and business continuity planning
must change to keep pace with these new challenges and to be cost effective
must include Internet based services such as online backup to minimize business
interruption; but having a resilient office IT infrastructure is of course about
more than backing up data, vital though this is.
Many small businesses have data stored on users' workstations
without a central server. This configuration lacks access control and resilience.
If your IT is structured in this way there are some relatively simple and inexpensive
measures you can take to decrease your current exposure to hardware faults and associated
data loss.
One of these measures would be to consider buying
an additional PC to act as a server onto which all user data would be migrated;
meaning that individual workstations would then hold applications only i.e. Outlook,
Word, Excel, Access, Sage, etc; this would provide a centrally managed data repository
from which the online backups could be run. In the event of needing to replace a
workstation, the task is then simply to install the required applications rather
than having to restore and resynchronize data as well. This centralization could
also bring other advantages such as allowing users to share data and perhaps configure
secure remote access into the office for mobile users or for use from home.
Another measure to consider, once data is stored centrally
would be to virtualise the server PC. This essentially means running the
operating system within a software ‘black box’. This black box could
then be backed up in its entirety to the Backups4All data centre. Once this virtualization
was achieved, in the event of loss of your server PC, or even the loss of your office,
we could copy the black box data from the data centre onto a new PC and potentially
have the business up and running in hours rather than days or even weeks. Additionally,
a second standby server could be configured if required for even higher levels of
resilience.
Each business has its own requirements, so
if you would like to discuss disaster recovery and business continuity for your
business please call us on 0845 643 0891 or email dr@backups4all.co.uk
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