Sometimes I feel like Chicken Little. Only I’m not screaming “The sky is falling down!”, I’m screaming “You’ll lose your data if you don’t back up!”. That’s the thing about being in my position, I know what can happen if you aren’t backing up your data, but there’s no way for me to communicate that message without sounding like a Dooms-Dayer.
Why You Need Backup
As a marketer, I get the opportunity to talk with clients a few times a month, usually when collaborating on articles or writing a case study. I talk to them about 2 main things: 1) Why they chose to work with GreySignal and 2) Why they actually had to use GreySignal.
Hearing why clients chose to work with GreySignal is always enlightening. It helps to determine our value proposition, improve our service offerings, and in general learn about our target demographics. Alternatively, hearing about why companies had to use GreySignal backup reminds us of why it is so important for companies to be backing up data.
These phone calls are all horror stories with happy endings. There are two specific stories I’d like to share with you.
The first story came to me shortly after Hurricane Sandy, in October of 2012. One of our resellers had been backing up some clients on tape, and others on the cloud. For those that don’t know, Hurricane Sandy hit harder than expected, and shut down New York City and the Jersey Shore for several days. During this time period, the clients had trouble accessing their original data and had to rely on backups to continue their day to day functions.
The second story comes from a local dentist. He came in to work one morning to find out that his appointment system simply wasn’t working. After a call to his IT consultant and the system maker, it was obvious that the data couldn’t be recovered from the system. He would need to turn to his backup.
Take it to the Cloud
The cloud isn’t just for fun apps like Decide, used for comparing electronics prices, or HuddleSync, used to push content to employees mobile devices. No, the cloud isn’t just for fun and games. It is also the most powerful backup tool available.
Security isn’t the only thing you need to be thinking about; Ease of use and speed are major factors in data backup and recovery, and the cloud has other technologies beat. Consider the following testimonial we recently received:
“…I have had a few issues requiring restoring from backup and sometimes have used GreySignal even though I had a good tape because it can be faster than restoring from tape.” IT Director, National Non-Profit Organization
Cloud backup is more secure, easy to use, and easy to recover data. But don’t take the users word for it, consider the rest of the two stories from above.
In the first example, one of our resellers has clients on both cloud backup and manual (tape/disk/array) backup. When the Hurricane hit, the reseller needed to get their client’s data back quickly and accurately. For their clients on cloud backup, the reseller was able to share a link to the data vault, where the data was easily downloaded and companies were back online within hours. For the clients on manual backup, the reseller specialists had to drive to an area that was not hit hard by the storm to build an entire new data center to run operations out of. In these cases, the clients lost an entire day on both the front and the back end of the new data center build out. That would have resulted in a major loss of business and time for those clients. The cloud clients were able to get up and running and never missed a business day.
In the second example, the system simply malfunctioned one night. There was no opportunity for the dentist to prepare for impending doom, and thus was caught completely off guard. Luckily, he backs up his systems every night, so when the software manufacturer could not find an easy solution for the problem, he was able to restore the data quickly and easily. He didn’t lose time or miss any appointments because he was able to get everything immediately.
Why you Need Cloud Backup
Backing up data simply isn’t an option anymore. You need to be able to easily access all of your business critical data whenever a disaster, man made or nature made, occurs. The key is to make sure that you can get your data quickly and easily.
So, how are you backing up?
Learn more about the Business Case for Cloud Backup in our newest whitepaper today!
