At the heart of every reliable technology solution is a solid back-up solution. As much as anyone would like to say: this system will never fail, reality tells us that sooner or later something will go wrong.
There are several different ways we protect your data from hardware failure, accidents, and unexpected situations. The first way is to maintain on-site incremental and bootable back-ups. The second way is by maintaing off-site back-ups to protect against theft and/or disasters at the office; all data is sent over a fully encrypted connection for maximum security. With all of your information backed up in multiple locations, you can be confident that your company's vital information is safe, no matter what happens.
Have you ever deleted a file, and then either right away, or several days or even months later, realized that you actually wanted that file?
Or perhaps a virus infected your system, and you need to restore to how everything was before the virus hit?
Incremental back-ups provide a solution to both of these problems. When we design a back-up system, we will integrate an incremental back-up system in your office; this system allows you to quickly and easily retrieve files that are deleted by accident or carelessness, or even to preform audits.
One day the hard drive decides to crash on one of your production computers, and a big project is due the same day. What now?
With standard back-ups, the time-consuming process of re-installing the operating system, re-configuring the computer, and migrating all the old information begins after the new hard drive is installed.
Bootable back-ups on the other hand, let you simply copy the back-up to the new hard drive through an easy-to-use restore utility, and resume working just as before; but with a brand new hard drive. Fast, effective, and simple.
Off-site back-ups are invaluable to a business for multiple reasons:
There are two common obstacles to off-site back-ups:
At Ardent Flame, we have solved the first problem by including a high-speed internet connection with each of packages, and connecting your office to our data-center via a highly encrypted connection. In addition, if you are in the Coeur d'Alene area, your traffic never leaves the local network to go from your office to our datacenter. We also solved the second problem by investing our time in testing out countless solutions until we found a stable, scalable solution. Once we identified the solution, we built the infrastructure at our data center to be able to support securing your valuable information. You no longer have to worry about the system design, or costly costs and coordination to set-up your own dedicated equipment in the data center.
While this is not truly a back-up solution, if you want high availability, this is a critical component. Redundancy is simply two of the same device backing the other up, so if one fails, the other takes over the whole load to keep the system running even with hardware off-line!
Anything in your office can be redundant; but we have found the first item to make redundant are your server's hard drives. The server is the core of your system, and keeps the most people running. The second step towards a redundant office would be to get a second internet connection; if you subscribe to our CIS, this may mean you keep your existing service in addition to the connection included inside the package.