Business Backup Service

We have a full range of business backup services to suit businesses and organisations of all sizes and needs. From the small business that just needs a daily backup of vital data to the larger business that may require a full backup of their server every 15 minutes with storage both on-site and replicated to a secure online backup storage service with virtualised server capability.

Although many think of Earthquake, Fire, Flood, and Extreme Weather etc. as the primary reasons for having a business backup plan, the reality is that these natural disasters only account for about 14% of all data loss.

Other than Natural Disasters the top 5 other reasons for data loss are:

Human error. We all make mistakes. So too do your employees. In the authors 20+ years of being in the technology support industry this factor is huge reason for loss of data.
Viruses and Malware. In more recent times Ransomware has reared its ugly head and made backups the primary defence against having to pay a huge ransom.
Hard drive damage and other hardware failures. Typically hard drives have about a 3-5% failure rate in their first 3 years. After that the failure rate grows exponentially.
Software corruption. This will often occur after a power outage that leads to an improper shutdown, or all to commonly, something as trivial as a borked windows update or patch.
Malicious employees or hackers. Often data stolen or deliberately erased can not be recovered. This effect may go unnoticed for some time until the employee leaves. Backups and email archiving solutions are an essential defense.

How do modern business backup systems work?

A backup system simply automates the process of backing up your important computer records and transferring them to a set of secure on-site and offsite locations. Typically In some smaller businesses the on-site backup might be omitted and the backup is to secure online storage alone.

A backup client is installed on your device(s) and when it backs up your data, it does so using “military grade” encryption at all points of the backup journey to the secure vault. The only stage at which your backup is decrypted is when you need a restore.

Reporting of any faults or problems, is monitored by trained technicians on a daily basis to ensure the integrity of your data and quick remediation.
This management of your backup system is highly important and removes much of the human error associated with untrained customer staff trying to manage something that they simply don’t understand or lose focus on.

How much do backup systems cost?

Like all things, the cost depends on what your business needs in terms of recovery time expectations, how much data you have, and where that data is located.

For our smaller clients we like to think in terms of a “Dollar a Day” as being a good guideline. If your business is not worth a dollar then maybe you need to think a lot harder about what value you are creating by being in business.

Im using Dropbox, Google Drive, OneDrive, Box or Some other syncing Service - Do I need to backup?

Whilst these services are excellent it must be remembered that they are only file syncing services and not primarily designed as a backup. One customer we know recently succumbed to a Cryptolocker Virus and all their important files were locked up. Imagine the mess, delays and frustration when the infected files then synced to the dropbox. We did manage to get the dropbox service to roll back the changes after some considerable delay (Support often is US Business hours only - In this instance our Monday is their Sunday, so nothing got fixed until Tuesday). If you factor in the downtime and the support charges, the cost of a using proper backup vs. syncing pales into insignificance.

I'm using Microsoft Office 365 or Google's G-Suite - Do I need to backup?

Microsoft or Google may host the infrastructure for these excellent services, but this doesn’t relieve the business owner of responsibility to maintain a backup of data. In fact, ownership of data in the cloud — being able to set up, access, recover or move it — is your obligation, not Microsoft's or Google's.