IT Continuity for your Business

The Problem

Businesses of all sizes are highly reliant on their IT servers. These vital pieces of equipment hold your data files, your accounts, your customer data, your Email and much more besides. Most businesses run a data backup of some sort, either to tape, disk or off-site via the Internet. However, what most business owners fail to consider is how long it would take to get you working again if your server was lost or damaged and to put in place a realistic disaster recovery strategy.

Think about this... it would typically take 1 day to find and take delivery of an appropriate new piece of server hardware. Another day to install the Windows operating system, install the associated services (like Exchange and SQL Server), the data backup software and then re-install all the patches and security updates. It would then take another day to actually restore your data from disk or tape (and even longer if it had to be downloaded from an off-site backup service.)

That's at-least 3 days with no access to any of your IT systems... no Email, no files, no accounts... no IT continuity for your business. In this day-and-age, where Email is critical to the operation of your business, you simply cannot afford to be 'down' for that length of time. If you can't process customers' orders, they may go elsewhere. We think that this is unacceptable and we believe that most business owners would agree with us.

MBM's Disaster Recovery Solution

Conventional backup and restore processes just don't cut it anymore, so we have created an online service that continuously streams your critical IT server to our Midlands data centre. Any changes made on your server such as new files, Emails, updates, etc are copied almost immediately to this remote backup server over your Internet connection.

This process is similar to off-site data backup; however the main difference is that we are continuously restoring your data on to a hard disk at our end. This means that in the event of a serious failure, you don't have to wait for a restore operation to finish. Our backup is always a complete, working and ready-to-go image of your server from just before the point where your machine was lost.

So if and when something goes terribly wrong with your server (stolen, damaged or seriously crashed), we simply marry-up the live version of your server that we have in our data centre with a loan server and bring them both to your site. Our engineer then starts your server on the loan hardware and your business is back on-line in hours... not days!

We are therefore constantly ready for an IT failure and can deliver you a working server in the event of the worst happening. No delays, no restores, no hassle. And if you're ever been through an IT disaster in the past and have experienced no Emails or no Internet access, you/ll know just how frustrating that is.

Our Price

Our disaster recovery / IT continuity service costs an affordable £160+VAT per month for a server with less than 1Tb of data. It is a minimum one year contract with no setup fee. If you have lots of servers and more data than that, please call us and we will arrange a discount.

The Practicalities

Geography - We are based in the West Midlands so can reach any part of the UK mainland within a day.

Your Internet Connection - You will need a proper, business-grade Internet connection. If you can't send us your server updates promptly, we cannot guarantee that we will have your data and hence provide an up to date recovery service.

Admin Access - We will need to have access to our software on your server. This is so our technicians can ensure that everything is running well and make changes if necessary. We will not have direct access to your data.

The Additional Benefits

1. The service includes world-class data backup software which, along with streaming updates to our data centre, can also be used to backup your server to a set of USB disks locally... you can never have enough data backups.

2. If you were to lose your entire building, our loan server (and your latest server image) can be bought to a different location. A small business might be able to get up and running again from the managing director's dining room table!

3. We will help with your day-to-day data recovery. Data backup systems are most often used to retrieve single files or folders when they have been accidently deleted or overwritten. Our technical team will help you with that remotely.

Conclusion

We have been supplying computer networks and IT support to businesses for over 20 years. During that time we have seen many organisations lose their servers, either through theft, physical damage or an IT issue like an infection or disk failure. Although every customer performs their data backups, the time to restore those backups (known as the 'Recovery Time') is too slow in today's fast-paced world. Our service addresses that issue using world-class software, a robust central data centre, pre-restored server images and skilled technicians who are ready-to-go at a moment's notice.

So, please take a minute to think about how long your backup would take to restore and then consider if you can afford to be down for that long.

If you want an IT continuity solution that will get you working again in hours rather than days, please call us on 01902 324494 to discuss your requirements.