Disaster-proofing your business
– plan ahead for peace of mind

The earthquake that struck Canterbury in September 2010, coupled with the ongoing aftershocks, is a stark and immediate reminder that disaster can strike at any time without much - or any - warning.  

In the immediate aftermath of the earthquake, many businesses were forced to close for days, or temporarily lost access to their premises or computer hardware.  Loss - or even temporary inaccessibility - of business data interrupts business continuity. This situation can be potentially damaging for a business's livelihood and highlights the importance of taking steps to safeguard critical business data so that your business can operate through a crisis.

A bit of forethought and preparation, such as putting combined online backup and disaster recovery policies in place for your business, can make coping with disaster much easier.

Forward planning

Online backup is essentially a backup of your business data and email over the internet.  Conventional backup methodologies - such as tape and CD Rom - are unsatisfactory because of high failure rates during restoration, forgotten tape rotations, the difficulty in detecting problems with backups before performing restoration and high maintenance costs.   Instead of having a tape drive onsite, the client server is connected remotely to a datacentre and files are backed up directly to the datacentre.

"The beauty of it," says CodeBlue's General Manager Ian Funnell, "is that at any time the CodeBlue Service Desk can easily locate a file - wherever it is - and restore it.  This is faster, safer and more cost-effective for our clients, as there is no investment in or maintenance of back up equipment."

Disaster recovery procedures involve taking an image of a client's entire computer environment and storing it offsite.

For many of CodeBlue's clients in Christchurch, having online backup and DR policies in place meant that even when their building or computer hardware became temporarily unavailable, CodeBlue was able to help by setting the businesses' employees up to work remotely and to have all their critical business data and email available.  Christchurch businesses were able to deal with the problems at hand, while keeping their operations running.

CodeBlue's datacentres are spread across the country and data is stored in multiple locations.  The Christchurch datacentre survived the earthquake and data was immediately available.  However, had the Christchurch datacentre not been available, another datacentre has a full copy of the data held in Christchurch.

Outsource your disaster to CodeBlue

Every company needs a Disaster Recovery Plan but many companies put it in the "too-hard basket." The Canterbury earthquake is a reminder that putting off that planning can be ruinous.

Disasters like theft, fire and flood - as well as other natural disasters such as earthquakes - can cost a business thousands of dollars. The biggest cost can be lost business - some businesses never recover from a disaster if they are crippled long enough to start losing customers.

CodeBlue's Disaster Recovery service makes disaster recovery easy and accessible.  For a fixed monthly price, CodeBlue will handle all of a business's DR requirements.

CodeBlue's complete outsourced managed service includes initial consultation to put in place a comprehensive backup and DR plan; installation of imaging software to image critical server environments; secure offsite storage; weekly image backup and remote verification to ensure the image has been backed up to disc; and availability of a 'hotspare' server supplied by CodeBlue if equipment is stolen or damaged.  CodeBlue can get your business up and running again in a matter of hours.

Never think about backups again

CodeBlue takes full responsibility for best practice backup processes, giving businesses peace of mind.  CodeBlue's remote online backup solution backs up incremental changes to business data daily, to one or multiple offsite backup servers.

For a monthly fee, CodeBlue restores files and mailboxes at the click of a button.  CodeBlue's Service Desk monitors backups daily, and conducts full test restores.  Critical users' mailboxes can be backed up as well as all Microsoft Exchange Server data. Optional continuous data protection technology captures every version of a file that has been saved to your hard drive.

More information

For more information about CodeBlue's Online Backup and Disaster Recovery services and how they could work for your organisation: Contact us.