HURRICANE SEASON: BUSINESSES RISKING TOO MUCH

In a recent survey conducted by ClickBack.net, nearly 54% of Florida businesses with under 100 employees had insufficient data backup/disaster recovery plans. Nearly 25% of businesses that close temporarily due to disaster never re-open, despite availability of low-interest FEMA/SBA loans.

“Before hurricane Ivan hit us in Pensacola, we just never thought it would happen to us,” said Jessica W., owner of a very successful corporate gift basket service. “Most of our inventory was destroyed, and our computers that held all our customer data and served our web site were sitting in 3 inches of water. We lost all our “reminder” data for customers, and all the customer orders for the scheduled gift baskets that we send out automatically on certain dates. Accounting records, marketing documents, contact lists, it was all gone. We almost went out of business, and a year later we’re still struggling to rebuild our customer data.”

This story is typical of small businesses, even in often-hit hurricane zones. Many, it turns out, know the need to back up their data but either don’t do it or don’t do it well. “There is a common misconception about what good backups are,” says a PC repair technician at Best Buy.

Good backups entail getting your data written to a reliable storage medium on at least a weekly basis and stored in an off-site, geographically-separate location. Keeping those backups off-site is critical in case you suffer a disaster such as fire, flood, earthquake, hurricane, etc.

The old standard for backups was tape technology, where a business would backup their data to tape and then take it off-site each night. Unfortunately, it’s a less than reliable technology, needing frequent tape cleanings, tape replacements, and diligent rotation off-site which often includes transportation and storage costs. It’s expensive, too, with a moderate solution costing $3000 and a couple hundred dollars a year in tapes. Security is also suspect—tapes can be lost or stolen, like in the recently announced CitiFinancial incident where the company lost tapes containing information on 3.9 million customers.

Fortunately, better and cheaper options abound. ClickBack.net recently opened a new Disaster Recovery Data Center to handle the backup needs of Florida businesses for as little as $25 per month. “It’s an ideal solution to the problem of small business backups,” says Jessica W., who subscribed to the service shortly after losing her customer data. “It took us 10 minutes to set it up and get our first backups running. Now, backups run every night and I know they’re safely stored in a data center in another state. It’s zero maintenance, and best of all it costs less than that we pay for filtered water each month.”

Other uses for remote backups include protection against data loss resulting from viruses, hackers, computer crashes, computer software bugs, and accidental or malicious employee behavior.

Businesses can get started very quickly. They open an account and download and install the powerful, but easy-to-use backup software. They select the files they want to backup, when they want to back them up, and then they let it run every night, reliably backing up files. In addition to being compressed, data is scrambled with 448-bit encryption before being transmitted, so it’s fully HIPAA Final Security Rule compliant for medical information. And, data is stored for 30 days (default) to 5 years (optional), so a business can recover any version of a document to any point in time.

Pricing starts at $25 per month per 1000 megabytes (MB) for each computer to be backed up. Additional blocks of 1000 megabytes are $9 per month, and flexible multi-computer network backup options exist. There are no long-term contracts, and the software is compatible with Windows 98SE and later and is suitable for backing up files from desktops, laptops and servers. A free 15-day trial is available. See http://clickback.net/ for more information and a video demonstration.

"Kudos to ClickBack.net for a reliable, easy-to-use backup solution! Sometime last week we made some big mistakes in QuickBooks and didn't notice until now. ClickBack.net let us go back to last week, restore the QuickBooks file from before we messed it up, and continue where we left off. It saved our small art studio almost $7,000," said Erica K. of Port Washington, Wisconsin.

ClickBack.net is an online/remote backup services provider with Disaster Recovery Data Centers in Chicago, California, Minnesota and South Carolina. Utilizing the latest over-the-wire-to-disk backup technology, the company can securely backup and restore critical business documents over the internet much more affordably than other solutions. The http://clickback.net web site contains a wealth of information about backup technology, scenarios, and eye-opening horror stories from businesses that lost data.

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If you’d like more information about this topic or the services offered by ClickBack.net, please visit http://clickback.net, send email to info@clickback.net, or call 877-546-6502.