Data and backup recovery are crucial to any business. Think of it as an insurance policy against disaster. What would you do if your critical system crashed and you had an old backup set or no backup of that data? You might be out of business. Platinum ITS applies a three tiered approach to data redundancy, ensuring that no matter what happens, you can recover your data in a timely fashion. This is something every business should have at the bare minimum and if your IT department or IT consulting firm tells you anything different, it’s time to rethink their value. Here is a quick synopsis of the typical way Platinum ITS manages customer data redundancy:

• Redundant File & Folder Existence. What does this mean? This means that files, databases, email and other business critical data is copied to the same server or redundant server either nightly or in real time. Imagine a server crashing and you are working on hundreds of files on that server and continue to do so without even knowing the primary member went down. This is file system high availability. Other IT companies may charge thousands or tens of thousands to try to implement this. Guess what? Many of these tools have been part of Windows server operation systems since the early 2000s and is totally free. These can be set up and in place in mere minutes to protect your data.
• On Premise Backup. We all imagine a backup to be a big server copying data to tapes every night. This technology was end of life twenty years ago but most IT companies still employ and depend on a technology that is outdated and not reliable. On premise backup of servers and data should be made to USB, NAS and server vaults, at high speed, with reliable software, not to archaic tapes that take hours to load and restore data. This level of backup is usually made nightly, weekly, quarterly and yearly in order to span both recent and possible long span recovery. This is the backup that most companies rely upon and it’s the most crucial and often used. Note that neither the previous backup method nor this type of backup will protect your company in the event of physical disaster like fire, flood, tornados, earthquakes, etc. That is why Platinum ITS highly suggests the third tier as well.
• Off Site Backup. This is also often referred to as cloud backup. Platinum ITS found one local government agency paying over $700 a month for a “cloud service” to backup very little data. The same could be accomplished by a better vendor at $150 a year or less. You do the math: $8400 vs $150 a year? Which would you pick? Don’t let IT companies fool you into costly high end buzz word solutions that do no more than basic ones. Vendors like Carbonite and IDrive have reasonable plans that fit most clients and are fairly sophisticated. Larger clients use Disaster Recovery sites hosted at large data centers in our local area to maintain data redundancy and application redundancy as an alternative to cloud backup.

Contact Platinum ITS today to learn more about safeguarding your data and generating a plan to keep your business running no matter what issue threatens to stop it.