None of us expect the worst to happen, and any small business owner can verify that the worst usually happens at the least convenient time! A disaster can arise out of nowhere and can wreak havoc with your IT systems. Everything from theft to a fire, a power cut to a riot: these things are all beyond your control, and they creep up on you when you least expect it.
Any service that is vital to the running of your business is described as ‘business critical’. In other words, business critical services are the services you definitely don’t want to lose access to – ever. Email is usually considered business critical: if your staff are spread remotely, or access their calendar, contacts and email on the move, it’s even more important.
It’s easy to forget to make plans for disaster recovery, or to keep delaying the composition of a disaster recovery plan because of the time or cost pressures most small businesses face. But a failure of those business critical IT systems isn’t just an inconvenience – although that can be a big part of the problem. It can also cost you dearly. Consider a disaster that takes out your office equipment for whatever reason. Suddenly the provision of core business services, like email or the scheduling of meetings, can be thrown into complete disarray if you’re not properly prepared.
Hosted exchange is really valuable to small businesses that don’t have a lot of money or resources to formulate a disaster recovery plan. That’s because a lot of the hard work is done for you. Your business gets all the benefits of a fast, stable, business-grade email system, but without the burden of sole responsibility: your host is the one who arranges the backups and ensures that a robust fail-over plan is in place should the worst happen. That’s one less problem for you to deal with.
We all know we should take regular backups. How many of us actually do? With hosted exchange, none of your data is stored on-site without a backup being made automatically elsewhere: even if the disaster were to occur at a data centre, rather than on your premises, backups still exist in other locations. Even if you did keep backups of your own server, are you confident that you could restore those backups quickly? How much would it cost, and how much time would it take? How many clients would switch to a competitor if they heard your systems had crashed, or they failed to get a response to a query because the data had been lost? You may miss critical emails you never even knew you’d received.
Hosted exchange gives you total peace of mind in the unfortunate event of a disaster. Even if all of your equipment were to be destroyed, you could pick up your emails at an alternative location and, most importantly, nothing would be missing.
Please don’t hesitate to contact us.