In last month’s blog, we discussed a true-life scenario where a less expensive, file based, cloud backup solution was used instead of a recommended image based backup and disaster recovery solution. If you recall, this resulted in nearly two weeks of downtime in order to bring the company back to a normal running state. In this month’s blog, we will outline another scenario based on true events, but with a much better outcome.
The Penney Wise Financial Company (fictitious to protect their identity) manages funds for its associated union and members. When discussing backup solutions with management, they understood the value of uptime and the cost to be incurred if their employees cannot work due to a system failure, so they went with the image based backup and disaster recovery solution that we presented to them.
Around one month after implementing the image based backup, The Penney Wise Financial Company’s Dell server went down due to a failed system board. Within an hour of receiving their call, our technicians were on-site, spoke to Dell, and diagnosed the issue. Within less than an hour our technician had the server up and running on the image based backup and everyone was able to go back to work with only a couple hours of productivity lost.
The following day, a Dell technician arrived to replace the failed board. Since the users were on a backup server, not the production server that had failed, there was no interruption for the users and the Dell technician could take his time and confirm the diagnosis and repair. After repair of the server, we waited a few days until we were satisfied it could be relied upon. Once satisfied, our technicians returned on the weekend to restore the backup server to the production server.
As you can see, it only takes one part in a complex infrastructure to halt almost all work in a company. Having an imaged based backup solution may be cheaper, but if one part of your infrastructure fails the cost to recover your data would outweigh the cost of an image based backup. The cost of lost productivity, salary for employees that cannot work, and failure to meet the needs of whomever the company serves greatly eclipses that cost of a good backup solution in less than an hour.
If you are unsure of whether or not your company has a backup solution in place or what type of backup solution you are utilizing, reach out to your trusted IT service provider. It is important to proactively determine your disaster recovery plan, so you can be prepared for any hardware failures, Crypto lockers, employee espionages, fires, and/or thefts.