We regularly encounter businesses that are using offsite, remote, Internet based backup providers such as Mozy, iDrive, Dell DataSafe (which is Mozy, re-branded).  This is always a concern for us, as it gives a false sense of security that your data is protected.  If you read my previous post “Forget Backup, Think Recovery“, you’ll know where I’m coming from.  Having your data backed up is just the first step, what you’re really after is a Recovery plan.

I was reading some blog posts from another IT provider, and read a great article on how an attempt to restore data from Mozy turned into a complete nightmare.  You can read the full post here (it really is worth reading in entirety).   In short, it took 11 days before the data was available to start the restore process.  There was still more time involved in the actual restore process – they  had to rebuild their Active Directory and Exchange databases from scratch.  Could you imagine your business being down for 2 weeks straight?  This particular customer was without email, files, without a network essentially.  Insane.

The best way we’ve found to properly include Recovery in your Disaster Recovery Plan is to have the ability to use your backup system as a stand-by or fail-over server.  You can’t afford to wait days for data to be downloaded or shipped and then finally restored.  Having the recovery capability built into your backup system means you can be up in running in minutes, not days.  For many businesses this is a must, not a ‘would be nice to have’.

I know that Mozy is cheap.  They have plans for as low as $4.95/month for unlimited storage.  But you have to ask:  “Am I going to trust one of my most important assets to a company based purely on what’s the cheapest?”  Would you go to the cheapest dentist you could find?  Or go hire a lawyer or accountant based on the fact that his/her hourly rate is the lowest?  You’d probably try to get a referal, and talk to some of their other clients, and look for the best value, and most importantly work with somebody you can trust.  Don’t get me wrong, these services have their place, it’s just that  Mozy is probably better suited in the home environment, where you can afford to wait for a restore.

Affordability is key, I get that, but when the ‘stuff’ hits the fan, and your business is at risk, you need to be able to rely on your Recovery system.  I’m sure that it was the longest 11 days the owner of that business ever faced, wondering if all their data is even going to show up, let alone be restored.

If you’d like to get a  Backup and Disaster Recovery audit, where we actually put your systems to the test, please Contact Us. Don’t wait until you’re down – a little bit of planning today, will save your business tomorrow.   Hope is not a strategy.

PS – I’ve got to give thanks to the author of the blog post I referenced (no author listed).   It’s easy to blog about your successes, but the sharing of his nightmare will hopefully serve as a valuable reminder on how critical it is to have a full Recovery plan.  It also highlights the importance of testing your Recovery system on a regular basis.

Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the past year, you’re well aware of the coming 2010 Olympic Games to Vancouver.  While this is exciting for our city and all the opportunities it can bring, a lot of people are bracing themselves for the impact.

VANOC and Translink have stated in press releases that a lot of downtown will be closed off during the games, and have suggested making alternative plans.  I’ve even heard reports of officials suggesting that it may be a good time for some businesses to go on vacation!  I’m not sure about you, but I don’t have a pile of cash that I’m sitting on in order to send our employees on a 2 week vacation.  We’ve put together some tips to help you.

There are plenty of alternatives available and we’re working closely with our customers, particularly those in the downtown core to make this as easy as possible.

Now would be the time to come up with a plan for having key personnel work from home and telecommute.  Prepare your IT infrastructure now to safeguard important data, and to allow secure remote connections to your information systems for both data and voice communication.

There are numerous technologies that are available to allow employees to work from home just as if they were sitting in front of their computers in the office.  Here’s a quick run-down of some things you’ll need to think about before February 2010, when the games are scheduled to begin.

• Have a look at the planned road closures.  You can find the maps that VANOC has provided to the public of their transportation plans.  Check to see if your business is going to be affected.
• Translink has setup a series of pages of tips for businesses on how to deal with the impact.  You can see them here.
• Translink is suggesting that anyone  not staying downtown Vancouver for the Games or event to leave the area by 2:00pm every day.
• Work with your IT Provider to setup and document a plan for employees to telecommute during the games.  Do this now, rather than waiting until the last minute.  You’ll be surprised at how easy and affordable it is to do this.

What’s nice about this, is that even after the games are over and long gone, you’ll still have your IT systems setup for remote working.  This is useful in many ways, including employees that are sick, or are concerned about the effects of H1N1 Flu, and need to stay home.

Contact us today to discuss what your options are, and schedule a free analysis to see how we can help prepare your business for teleworking before, during and after the Vancouver 2010 Olympic Games.

A lot of what we do here at Transparent revolves around protecting data and systems and ensuring business continuity for our clients.  We’ve seen our fair share of failed servers, crashed desktops and fried routers.  Almost all the new clients we meet have experienced some form of interruption, whether that is from a break-in, virus, hardware failure etc.  They’ve felt the pain.  They don’t want it to ever happen again.  We hear that message loud and clear!

We’re not immune to it ourselves.  You name it, I think we’ve experienced it.  At one point in the early days of the company we had a neighbouring business that was an incense factory.  They had a fire that ripped through the entire complex and basically destroyed everything, including our offices.  Some of our old paper records STILL smells like lavender from the incense fire.  We moved out of that office (or what was left of it) into our new home.  Within two weeks of getting setup, we were broken into and cleaned out.  All of our laptops, desktops, monitors, the works.  What a horrible feeling.  As we grew, we needed to move again.  Three months into a yet again new offices, and the floor above us sprung a leak and  water poured all through our shop all through the weekend.  Anything electronic was destroyed.   How much downtime did we experience or data did we loose?  Zero.

It’s a given that most businesses have some form of backup (sadly there are still some we encounter that have none).  However what they really need, is Recovery.  Too much emphasis is put on backup, it’s really should be called recovery.  That is the goal after all – to quickly recover.

Imagine this scenario – your server experiences a critical hardware failure and crashes.  Won’t come back to life – your not sure what’s wrong with it at this point.  You quickly get your IT manager (or whomever was handling your backups) to bring in the last backup tape.  Now what?  Hopefully all of the latest data is on that tape.  What do you do with it?

Well first before you can do anything, you need to get your server up and running before you can even start the restore process.  If that server is new, then you should have a hardware warranty with it.  Call in the technicians.  If you’re lucky they are there the next day to diagnose the issue, find out what parts need to be replaced or repaired.  If you’re lucky, it’s fixed a day or two later.  If it’s not under warranty, your shopping around for a new server, and the pressure is on to get it ordered and delivered in record time.  Before you can start to restore any critical data, first you have to get the operating system up and running with the right software and drivers.  Finally, you can start to restore the data.  You are hoping that the tapes have the latest valid data, but the reality is that tapes fail to restore far too often.  That is compounded by the age of the tapes.  While all of this is going on, your staff is without access to their data, email, calendars etc.

The end result is 2-3 days of downtime, and a if you’re backing up nightly, probably an entire day of lost data.  The high cost of rushed emergency labour and replacement of hardware is a drop in the bucket next to the lost wages, lost productivity, lost revenue, lost sales and potentially a tarnished reputation from frustrated customers.

All this assumes that everything went as planned, and that all data was on the tapes and tested.  In our experience that’s rarely the case.  In fact majority of issues that we’ve come across could have easily been prevented by simply testing the backup systems and trying to restore something.  Unfortunately most businesses wait until disaster strikes before they put their backup system to the test.

This begs the question – ‘How should businesses be preparing themselves for the inevitable crash or downtime?’.  I’m glad you asked

Here’s some minimum requirements  that every disaster recovery solution should have:

• Backs up everything automatically. Rather than trying to decide on what is important and what is not – assume everything on your server needs to be backed up.
• Backs up very frequently. Once a day is quite often just not enough.  Loosing a full days worth of data is a significant loss.
• Backs up both locally and off site.  Data needs to be kept off site in case of fire/flood/theft, however it also needs to be kept locally for rapid restoration.
• Easy to test restore. You shouldn’t have to bring down your entire system, or wait hours, or search for tapes to try to test the restore functionality.
• Restores all data, or just a single file quickly. Sometimes you don’t need to do a full recovery.  You may just need a single file or email.  It should be just as easy in either case.
• Provides the hardware required for continuity. Here’s a key item – your backup device should be able to act as an on-site standby server.  Ready to kick in at a moments notice.  That’s true recovery.
• Requires almost no human intervention. Your backup system should not rely on somebody having to remember to change tapes or drives.  It should work every time without a manual process.

That sums up the minimum requirements in a nutshell.  In reality we’ve just scratched the surface.  There are a lot more questions that need to be answered, such as:

• What is an acceptable amount of data loss for our company?  A day?  A week?  A month?
• What is our recovery time objective?  Do we have to get things back up and running in an hour?  A day?  A week?
• What happens to our email and  phone systems?  Do calls get forwarded?  To whom?
• Is there a manual process in place to complete orders and make sales?
• Who makes the decision to invoke the disaster recovery plan (ie who can pull the fire alarm)?
• Is the plan documented, and more importantly are key staff members aware of the plan and is it practiced?
• If the office is not accessible, where do staff work?  Do they take the day off?  Do they work from home?
• What business functions need to continue, what will get put aside temporarily?

As you can see there is lots to think about here.  Is it worth it?  You better bet your business on it!  I can personally say, without a shadow of a doubt that having the above systems in place, and a plan saved our business from being shut down, not once, but three separate occasions.  We experience the fire, the theft, the flood.  Is something else waiting for us around the corner?  Probably. But I’m not loosing sleep over it.  We have a plan and a system.  Its tried, it’s true and more importantly – it’s tested!

As always if you have any input or questions about this, please contact us, or leave a comment.

Transparent Solutions ranked no. 45 on Business in Vancouver’s Top 100 Fastest Growing Companies list.   We’re on that list with a lot of other great organizations, so it’s certainly an honour.

Our staff have been working very hard over here, so it’s nice to get recognized.  We’d especially like to thank our customers.  None of this would be possible without their continued support as we’ve grown.

Thanks again, and I hope we can make the list again in 2010!

I just received an email from the good folks over at Google that Transparent is now officially authorized as a Google Apps Reseller.  As far as I can tell we’re one only a handful in Canada, and even fewer here in Vancouver.  Google requires that Authorized Resellers have a excellent understanding of their platform, and can demonstrate bringing value to its end users. I believe there is just over 1000 worldwide at the time of writing of this post.   Compare that to the some 400,000 Microsoft partners.   I have a feeling that will quickly change in months and years ahead.

We’re pretty excited over here about the opportunities that will bring, for both us and for our clients. It’s means more options at the table as far productivity software and collaboration, and that’s long overdue in my opinion.

So what does that mean for your business?  Well, in a few words: a highly available and scalable infrastructure with no upfront capital expenses.  That fits quite nicely into our mantra of converting large capital costs into predictable monthly operational expenses.

For our initial Google Apps project, we migrated a local Vancouver company’s Microsoft Exchange mailboxes to the Google Apps platform.  We looked at the costs of purchasing, installing, licensing, and managing a Microsoft Exchange server for 15 users and compare that to the costs of Google Apps. It was pretty compelling, to say the least.

Google Apps will cost $50/year per user.  It comes with 25GB of storage, and include anti-virus and spam filtering.  For this particular customer that works out to $750 per year.  That’s less than the licensing alone for Exchange.  A lot less to worry about too – no patching, upgrades, antivirus, antispam, backup…. the list goes on.

Not to say the project went without a hitch – there’s always seems to be a few ‘gotchas’ lurking, but all in all it was rather smooth.  We performed the migration in phases, to give everybody time to adjust and deal with any glitches as they came.  Users could continue to use Outlook, or the Gmail web interface, depending on their preference.  That removed any anxiety that users felt – “Don’t mess with my Outlook!”.   We learned a lot in the process, and are excited to do more of these types of projects.

Naturally there’s a lot more to it than just putting your mail up into the cloud and washing your hands of any IT woes.  You’ve still have  specialized applications, desktops, anti-virus, files and documents, and issues with privacy laws (depending on your industry and region).  There’s a long way to go here, and not everything is ‘cloud ready’.  It helps to have a trusted IT advisor help navigate the options.

Well, I’ve resisted for as long as I can.  Blogging.  I have to admit, that the thought of it stirs some of the same emotions as visiting the dentist.  Avoid it for as long as I can stand the pain – then go, realize it’s not nearly as bad as I thought it would be, and feel a great sense of relief.

Why blog now?  I’ve held out for years now.  Simple – there’s just way too many cool and exciting changes taking place in the small business technology arena.  I want to share our experiences and successes with helping small business make the most out of technology.

I’ve been helping companies leverage their IT systems to stay competitive and grow for over 15 years now.  I’ve got a lot to share, and still even more to learn.  This blog will be that avenue, and if only a handful of people read it, and get something out of it, I think it will be worth it.

To sum up, the focus of this blog will be about:

• Solving business problems with technology
• Leveraging existing IT systems to reduces costs and increase productivity (ie better, faster, cheaper)
• Integrating new technologies that are emerging to stay ahead of the curve (and your competition), and increase profitability.
• Protecting your data and systems from any threats including viruses, failures, hacking, etc.

I look forward to any comments, and plan to add to this regularly.