There's a dirty little secret among IT professionals that you need to know - we're afraid of backups. More specifically, we're afraid of backups not working when we need to recover data from them, which happens more frequently than most would like to admit.
I quite honestly used to get nervous when a client request would come in to recover some file or other from backups, because I was never 100% confident I could get their data back. There was always this latent fear that something unforeseen would go wrong and I would have to deliver bad news to my client that their data was lost, something I absolutely hate doing and do my best to avoid at all costs.
But my fear of backups wasn't due to a lack of technical knowledge about setting up or managing them, but rather the uncertainty introduced by the failure-prone backup hardware and software. It's an indisputable fact that 100% of hard drives and tape cartridges will fail at some point. Take a minute to let that sink in... a 100% failure rate! And the really scary part is that you never know exactly when that failure will happen, and if the infamous Mr. Murphy's prophecy is to be believed, it will happen at precisely the moment when you need it to work.
The good news is that I no longer have a fear of backups, at least when it comes to our managed clients, because we have them all on Datto's business continuity solution. Business Continuity (or BC) is very different from the simple backup of old, because it focuses not on bits and bytes, but rather on making sure your data is always recoverable, and on getting you back up and running quickly after any disaster.
Datto is the undisputed leader in the business continuity market for small-medium businesses, having won industry award left and right, and with offices in the U.S., Canada, U.K. and Australia, and rapid expansion to the rest of the world. You can find out more about them at datto.com.
The term "disaster" is a bit misleading though, because it conjures up images of natural disasters like floods, hurricanes, tornadoes, wildfires and the like, which are extremely rare in our neck of the woods (Toronto and Southern Ontario). However, there are other smaller disasters that are much more common which we have seen, such as office floods due to burst pipes, leaky roofs or water heaters, water spilling from a rooftop air conditioner, office fires due to errors made by certified electrical contractors (yes they make mistakes), all of which can take your entire office IT infrastructure down.
But by far the most common "disaster" that causes downtime or data loss for a company is simple human error. A lot of people have a really bad tendency to click on things they shouldn't, and just one wrong click can allow Cryptolocker onto a computer and then bring the entire company network to its knees by scrambling all its precious files. Here's a recent example: a California hospital had to pay over $17,000 (USD) to get their data back, and experienced 10 days of downtime, simply because they didn't have working backups.
At this point you're probably wondering how this "magical" Business Continuity solution works, right? Well, I assure you there's no magic, just a very well engineered system with multiple levels of protection to keep your data safe and your business up and running.
It all starts with one of Datto's special appliances being installed at your premises and connected to your network. After being configured for your environment, it begins taking "snapshot" images of everything on your servers - Windows, programs, databases, settings, the works - as often as every 15 minutes. Should any of your servers then fail for any reason, the most recent snapshot image is used to quickly spin up a virtual fail-over server on the appliance in as little as 15 minutes, which allows your business to continue operating normally while the down server is fixed and put back in service.
In addition, to provide off-site data protection, each night the appliance sends the last snapshot image of the day to Datto's Canadian data centre in Toronto (soon to be joined by one out west for redundancy). And, using the same trick virtualization technology, a fail-over server can be created off-site as well. This means that if, for some reason, your office was completely out of commission, you and your staff could still work remotely from a temporary location and still have access to all the company data, email, databases, etc.
There's an old saying in the IT industry - an untested backup is worse than no backup at all, because it provides a false sense of security. And the reality is that somewhere around 99% of all backups are not tested regularly, because it takes a significant amount of time and resources to do it, and most people get lazy about it.
So Datto has automated the testing process so that it can be done every single day, and they automatically send us (and you if you like) a screenshot of each server's login screen to prove it can be recovered if needed. Here's one from this morning:
So the bottom line is this:
- Datto ensure there are always 3 copies of your data - production (on your servers), on-site (in Datto appliance) and off-site (at Datto's data centre).
- The snapshots are tested daily to ensure they are 100% working, and we get a screenshot of the Windows login screen to prove it (you can get this too).
- An on-site fail-over server can be ready in 15 minutes or less should one of your production servers fail for any reason.
- And an off-site fail-over server is available to cope with major disasters should one ever strike (we hope not, but nice to know it's there).
With the Datto business continuity solution in our arsenal, I no longer have any fear of not being able to recover data for my clients, because I know we've got them covered for virtually any contingency. This is something that a traditional backup system could never, ever, achieve.
For more information about this amazing solution, please contact Sentryon IT Solutions in the Toronto area at 416-440-1400 or nationwide at 1-866-698-3244.
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