Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity

Backups – they take time and money, and you hope you never need them. They are about as exciting as watching paint dry, or insurance. Unfortunately they are a necessity in this world of doing business. Vision Quest Information Solutions can’t make backups anymore exciting, but we can make you more productive by not needing to worry about them, and cheaper by streamlining your process.

We test your backups weekly, we monitor them 24/7. We can backup as often as every 5 minutes so your data will never be far behind from the time you need them. If you are in a jam and your data is already missing, our skilled techs will recover it for you, and as a last resort, we are partnered with one of the largest Data recovery centers in the US, Drive Savers. They even recovered some lost episodes of the Simpsons – https://drivesaversdatarecovery.com/company/data-recovery-hall-of-fame/

How long can you be without your data without it affecting your business? If your current IT provider has not asked you this question, you have a larger problem than an untested backup solution, you don’t have someone that is looking out for your business. Vision Question Information Solutions will spend the time to learn three things.

1. What does your business do to generate revenue?
2. What people are involved in these revenue generating activities?
3. What tools do your people use to do their job?

The answers to these questions will allow the staff at Vision Quest Information Solutions to craft a specific solution and plan of action for your business that is designed to answer the question, how long can your business be down, before you are out of business. This down time is referred to in the industry as your Recovery Time Objective, or RTO. One we know what your Recovery Time Objective is, we know what solutions and processes to bring to bear to get your business back up and running. This Recovery Time Objective will also dictate how expensive of a solution to install for your business. The less time that you can be done, the more expensive a solution that you need, but what we find is that most technology companies will provide a one size fits all solution, and this can end up being more expensive than necessary for your particular backup and disaster recovery needs.

One of the most common mistakes that I see companies make is to confuse Backup with Recovery, or more specifically Disaster Recovery. When something bad happens, if you have a backup of your data in place, you can restore that data. But what if the time and expense to restore or recover that data is actually a larger problem. If you have a backup of your data, but your server completely died, we need to order a new server, configure the server, install the software for the server, install the new server in your office, and then restore the backup of your data. And if your data was stored online, on the internet, or in the cloud, we might even have to wait days, weeks, or months for all of that data to completely download before we can restore the data. And even then we are not done, we have to put that data back in the right places, and folders, and then put the correct permissions on that data so that the correct people can or cannot access your business data. All of this could have been avoided with a proper backup and disaster recovery solution that correctly understood the needs of your business before a disaster comes to visit your business.

Concerned with your current backup strategy? (Or lack thereof?) give us a call for a free evaluation of your network and backup strategies.