Most of the our clients along the Green River in the Auburn, Kent, Renton, South Center and Tukwila areas are familiar with the increased flooding risk this fall after damage to the Howard Hanson Dam during the January flooding. On June 23rd, 2009, the Army Corps of Engineers warned of continued risk this fall after disappointing results of dam testing. The official King County report can be found here:
http://www.kingcounty.gov/safety/prepare/FloodPlan_GRiverBasin.aspx
Take just a moment and think about what your first actions would be if one morning, you suddenly couldn’t have any access to your office, in some cases, ever again. Unfortunately, NWCS has been one of those first calls several times in our 30 year history. We’ve worked with clients suffering from severe losses caused by fire, theft and water damage, but most often outages are caused by simple hardware failure. It’s always disappointing for clients when they realize exactly how much it costs to lose revenue and, in some cases, large amounts of data, especially when relatively inexpensive planning and protection measures could have mitigated the losses.
The terms “Data Protection”, “Business Continuity” and “Disaster Recovery” all initially sound like the same words, but they are in fact very different. In short, think of “Data Protection” as what most all of us are doing now, backing up data to separate media, taking it offsite and keeping multiple generations of the backup media. Think of “Business Continuity” as how do you keep your business moving while you primary systems have failed, whether it be computers, power, phones, Internet, office space, etc. This is sometimes referred to as “fail over”. Think of “Disaster Recovery” as planning to return from “continuity mode” during a disaster to a pre-disaster state, sometimes referred to as “fail back”.
Northwest Computer Support has always worked to help small to medium business find cost effective ways to mitigate the risk of losing data, but it has been difficult to find “cost effective” business continuity solutions to mitigate the risk of hardware or even site failure. In early 2008, NWCS announced an innovative solution that actually solves the problem of server hardware or site failure at costs that make sense for SMB! The basis for the solution leverages recent advancements in virtualization and Internet based backup technologies to allow for rapid onsite and offsite virtualized server recovery. In many cases the annualized costs to prepare for and maintain readiness is very similar to what it would cost to refresh your existing tape backup solution.
To compliment the NWCS Business Continuity Solution which provides real time Internet based Backup along with virtualized onsite and offsite server recovery, NWCS has partnered with Agility Recovery Solutions which offers service plans starting in the couple hundred dollars per month range to provide emergency power, communications (Internet and Telephone) and even employee work space. Based on the fact that Business Continuity has been unaffordable to small and medium business, very little is understood about what is really possible for our client base. This is why we’ve been hosting Business Continuity Lunch and Learns twice each month. If you haven’t come to one, we’d love to have you attend!
Please check out a Technical Description of our Business Continuity Service or Register for an upcoming seminar!
Contact Us today if you would like to find out more about this service.
Rex Frank, VP Managed Services
Northwest Computer Support