Safeguarding against a disaster capable of claiming a company’s most sensitive and critical business data can be a costly affair. And since disaster recovery and business continuity solutions cover so many different aspects of a company’s environment, they are often complex and challenge-riddled entities to implement.  “For many small and medium sized businesses (SMBs),” says Hayden Lamberti, Application Solutions Business Unit Manager at Internet Solutions, “the whole backup, recovery and ultimately, disaster recovery space is a confusing and costly road to navigate. In fact, many of them shy away from the topic completely and simply sweep it under the carpet as something they don’t want to talk or think about.  “That is of course, only until some real data loss occurs within their business and they realise how important regular backup and recovery is,” he says. “That’s when the old adage about backups only mattering once data loss has occurred holds true,” he continues.

 

Lamberti says it’s not necessary for SMBs to shy away from the topic of protecting their business from data loss, since a number of cost effective and extremely innovative solutions have recently come to the fore. “In investigating the different options available to them SMBs should take a closer look at cloud-based disaster recovery solutions,” he adds. “We have found these to be extremely compelling both in terms of their ability to reduce costs and improve the level of protection a small company would usually be afforded.”  Lamberti says that one of the reasons traditional business continuity solutions are so expensive is because they require complex planning, the purchase of infrastructural elements both for the company’s primary data centre and off-site backup facility, and then of course the employment of highly-skilled experts capable of refining the solution and testing its effectiveness regularly.

 

“By outsourcing elements of their disaster recovery solution to the experts in their relative fields, smaller companies gain access to vital costs savings – since they’re sharing the overhead of the facility, infrastructure and skills required with a number of companies in the same situation,” says Lamberti. “It’s up to the outsourced partner to deal with these issues and through the economies of scale reached, offer a compelling cost benefit to its customers.  “By choosing such a solution, companies are also granted access to the best expertise the market has to offer. After all,” he says, “outsourced service providers tend to be specialists in their field of operation. However, the key lies in finding the parts of the business’s data that need protecting and sourcing partners capable of handling the backup, archival and safe storage of those information sources in an appropriate manner.”

 

Interestingly, Lamberti says the costs become almost insignificant when considered against the backdrop of how many individual users can be protected. “As an example, Internet Solution has a solution that archives and protects a company’s groupware data and can be customized to cover any number of employees, companies of all sizes or for any length of time required – both in terms of the physical age of the information and the number days’ protection afforded,” he says.  The IS Mail ArchivingPreserv8 solution is the result of extensions, modifications and upgrades the company has made to its hosted-Exchange solution over the years. “Offering the benefits of per-seat costs and the ability to avoid the capital expenditure involved with gaining access to groupware solutions, IS has been providing Microsoft Exchange functionality to customers in a hosted environment for a few years now,” he explains.

 

“In extending the value of this service, a year or two ago we added proactive archival, backup and recovery functionality into the basic offering made available to all customers,” says Lamberti. “Since many companies have Exchange servers, but find the implementation of archival, backup and recovery solutions either too expensive or onerous to manage, we saw value in offering this component of protection as yet another hosted service,” he adds.  Thus far, he says, the service has been a massive success. “We have had companies of all size subscribing to the service in the couple of months it’s been available,” he enthuses, “and since it’s configurable and inexpensive, even companies with existing disaster recovery solutions are leveraging IS Mail Archiving Preserv8 so that they have a backup plan for their proverbial backup plan.”

 

However, like most cloud-services, the most important benefit IS Mail ArchivingIS Presev8 brings to the table is its ability to give smaller players relief from the prohibitive capital expense of setting up a disaster recovery plan for their groupware. “And since e-mail, calendaring, group address books and the other information features built-into groupware solutions today house a great deal of a company’s business critical, sensitive information, by protecting this data, small and large companies are arguably eliminating the majority of the data loss risk they face,” he says.  “At R20 per user for the basic service, it’s probably the most affordable way of protection a company with fewer than 200 employees from the risk of data loss,” he concludes.