Great Lakes Computer Corporation

Managed Service Provider

Dell AppAssure

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Free eBook Explains the Key Elements of Disaster Recovery

Why you should update your data recovery plans

Organizations have had decades of experience in planning for disaster recovery.

• We know where the tapes are kept.

• We have spare server hardware on hand.

• We’ve protected installation media in a fire safe.

• We have off-site copies of key backups.

• And – if we’re smart – we’ve made plans with an alternate facility to host services after a loss.

But there’s a problem here: These are the decades-old plans of a decades-old IT industry.

Business has changed since then, and so has business technology. Virtualization in particular offers a way to completely revise the way we consider disaster recovery. If we’re doing things right, we can be back online in minutes and hours, not days and weeks. We can enjoy less data at-risk than ever before.

Even better, today’s technologies enable these Disaster Recovery capabilities for the smallest IT shop just as easily as the biggest enterprise. It’s all about having the right disaster recovery solution, and the right approach in using it.

Download the complete Free eBook

“Key Elements of a Successful Disaster Recovery Strategy” by MS MVP & VMware vExpert Greg Shields.

Learn more about the author Bob Martin

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Data Protection Case Study for Educators and Government Agencies

Dell AppAssureGreat Lakes Computer is proud to call ourselves a member of Dell’s PartnerAssure Program.  Dell AppAssure is the industry’s leading software for backup and replication for voicemail, physical and cloud comuting environments.

We also have a number of government agencies and School Boards we work with and provide services, from our managed print to our Data Protection services.

Below is a case study of how the entire state of Alabama’s Education system reduced their recovery time from 24 hours to 2 MINUTES.

Learn more about the author Bob Martin

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Online data backup: no longer discretionary

SMB’s recognize online data backup as a necessity

Free eBook AppAssureA growing number of small- and medium-sized businesses around the nation are beginning to recognize online data backup as necessary rather than discretionary expenses.  Increasingly, such businesses see data recovery as a critical need of the organization and regard online backup and recovery options as the most viable and affordable means of assuring that needed data will be available for daily workflow even when unforeseen events interfere with the regular operation of the business.  This trend, however, is nothing new; as far back as 2009, over 40% of SMBs were citing automated methods of data recovery from backups as a crucial IT need.

Barriers to adoption

Even though the need for automated online backup is apparent to even the smallest of businesses these days, not all SMBs have yet adopted the technology.  A variety of barriers to adoption exist, but when SMBs are polled, two factors stand out above the others: security and cost.

Cost considerations

A common approach of small businesses to online backup is to assume that this technology is only affordable for the big players in the market.  Actually, nothing could be farther from the truth.  Many online backup suppliers actually price their services in ways that make them highly accessible to small businesses.

A popular model in this regard is the pay-per-gigabyte approach, in which a business is assessed a variable charge during each payment cycle, with the charge directly reflecting the amount of bandwidth or storage actually consumed during the time period in question.  Thus, a small business that needs only a relatively tiny amount of backup space can be sure that they are not paying for capacity that will ultimately go unused.

Security

In this context, data security concerns can actually be ironic; businesses that back up their data on site and store it on the premises are actually open to more data loss scenarios than those that utilize an online backup solution.  A flood or fire in the office, for example, stands an excellent chance of destroying both primary data and all backups if data sets are stored in the same geographic location.  In contrast, backing up data in the cloud, which is an integral part of online automated backup, guarantees that a localized event cannot destroy all copies of the data in question.

Learn more about the author Bob Martin

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