Reasons why SMB may want to look into Secure Online storage

Passive DR

Your company doesn’t have a DR set up and it’s not in your budget.  The plan is, in the case of a system failure for whatever reason, that you would just go out and purchase new hardware, load the necessary programs and recover the database from your last backup.  This type of plan would bee greatly enhanced by an off-site secure repository where your daily, weekly or monthly backup could be stored.  System backups could also be stored in this model.  Different customers have different needs related to number of backups to be kept, frequency of new backups, etc.

Extreme DR  (aka “The Bunker”)

Your company has a great DR set up with redundant application layers, database layers and networking components.

But you believe Murphy was an truly an optimist and you still want another copy of your full system backups, and/or production database archive routinely stored in a secure off-site facility. 

Legal Discovery Requirements

Depending on your 's risk tolerance and the storage regulatory requirements you are advised to follow from your company’s legal advisors, you may want to utilize online storage databases to keep the data available for legal discovery reasons but NOT keep it on the initial system the data was created on.  Online storage is much cheaper than continuously increasing your company's infrastructure with increasingly large SAN units and application systems perform much better if data is properly archived off.  This could be your CRM system, your ERP system, even your email system.  Note this can be a huge endeavor, one that requires a degree of forethought and planning, and one that should not be entered into lightly.  Let us discuss your true needs with you to outline a proper strategy.

Analysis Repository – Historical (more trusted data) or near Real Time? (Leaning towards Historical due to several reasons)

Would you like to have an environment within which you can dump data from your existing systems and submit ‘what if’ questions without affecting your production related systems and which is economically feasible?  Data Warehouse projects have been known to be extremely expensive in terms of infrastructure before you begin to see any benefit from your endeavors.   What if you could send your customer and sales data to a black box and pull both canned reports and submit ad-hoc queries for resolution?  Would you be interested in the ‘connections’ that analysis on your data might expose to you?  Would that information be valuable? What business problem are you trying to solve?

Zombie Data can provide you with products and services to assist you with all of these scenarios.  If your firm is interested in reviewing their options - contact us at Zombie Data and we will set up an appointment to review your specific needs.