If something destroyed your primary servers – be it fire, cyber-attack or natural disaster – could your business keep on going?
Rotorua Hospital is learning the answer to that question at the moment. A fire tore through their server room, taking away access to electronically-stored patient records. The hospital doesn’t expect to have them again for up to a week. That’s meant cancelled surgeries, and patients being told to stay away if they can.
It’s an awful situation, and we feel for everyone involved. But if any good can be taken from it, it’s the reminder that it’s important to be prepared.
If you’re like many modern businesses, you keep pretty much all your vital data on servers. Client records, files, emails – all the stuff you use on a daily basis. If you didn’t have those, how much work could you get done? How much could your clients expect from you?
Backups are a good start
It sounds like Rotorua Hospital must have had backups. That’s great! Backups are really important, and you should have them. Follow the 3-2-1 approach, and you can be fairly confident you won’t lose your files for good. We offer options tailored to you via CloudBackup.
But they’re not always a quick-fix, particularly if you have to think about replacing destroyed or damaged hardware first.
But you should take it to the next level with backups AND disaster recovery
A disaster recovery service gets your systems up and running again quickly. It takes virtual replicas of your physical servers and stores them in our secure data centres. If your physical servers are destroyed or damaged, you can connect to the intact replicas. You’ll be going again in hours, rather than days or weeks. You can keep working as you repair or replace your physical servers.
We offer this with TotalDR. It runs from our secure data centres in Auckland and Christchurch, which come with all sorts of important goodies:
- uninterrupted power supplies with backup generators
- protection from fire and flood
- extensive security and surveillance
- multiple internet connections.
Plus: cloud hosting might give you a more reliable and secure option
Having your servers onsite may not be the most cost-effective option, taking into account the power and space they need. And they might also lack the kind of security and fire protection that will keep them safe.
All those neat data centre features we talked about? You get the same benefits with our CloudServer.
And even if you have sensitive data such as patient records or legal client data, they’ll be just as safe in our cloud than in your office – perhaps even more so.
(Though, of course, it’s important you make sure those files are kept in New Zealand – and don’t worry, with us they always will be!)