Will Your Backup Be There When You Need It?

3327023537Abraham Maslow famously proposed a human "hierarchy of needs" in the field of psychology. His insight was that humans don't worry about higher needs (e.g. love and companionship) unless their lower needs (e.g. food and shelter) have been met.

I'm not certain what an IT-related hierarchy of needs would look like, but I do know that protecting your company's information is among the most basic and critical needs that an IT managed service must fulfill. Being able to diagnose why your email isn't connecting is important, to be sure. But it's a moot point if there's no backup and the server goes down.

We recently ran into two separate companies (neither of them were our customers) that found this out the hard way. Both had been paying an IT service company monthly for some level of service. Both ran into a situation where critical data on their server was lost.

This is the big moment - when you're an IT services company it's time to prove your worth and come out a hero - the moment you better not drop the ball. Time to go to the backup, restore the data, and tell your client they can breathe easy, because you've got this.

Except they didn't.

Two different IT companies, two different customers, two different situations, but the same result. In both cases, despite collecting payments for IT services each month, neither IT company was able to recover their customers' lost data.

This is the point where smoke starts coming out of a business owner's ears. It's the point where it makes no difference how friendly your techs are, how nice your brochures look, or how many certifications you've earned. If you can't get back their data when it's gone missing, you've failed at the most fundamental reason your clients pay to have you around.

This isn't hard - at least not in the sense of being complicated. It's only hard in the sense of requiring process, standardization, and discipline. At Castema, we are responsible every day for making sure several hundred servers have good backups, along with all the rest of the work we do. Because we've created processes for checking up on the backups, and because in every location we've standardized on the hardware and software that we know works and that has proven to work over and over again, and because we follow those processes and those standards rigorously, we're able to confidently look our customers in the eye and say, "We've got this."

Will your backup be there when you need it? If you're not 100% confident - but you'd like to be - maybe we should talk.