SMB IT | Curtis Franklin » Off-Site Backup for SMBs

August 02, 2006 | Comments: (0)

Off-Site Backup for SMBs

TAGS: SMB Applications

Off-site backup is a great guard against disaster recovery. Nothing protects your data when your office building gets melted by an alien death ray like not having your data in the office building. But usually, setting up an off-site backup, managing the wide area connection and interpreting the reports all required some new IT smarts on-staff. And the service wasn't cheap, either.

But cheap storage seems to have evolved into cheaper storage services, like DataPreserve. This company does off-site backup to a high-end data center (followed by yet another backup from there to yet another high-end data center) for total data redundacy...and it's priced for small businesses.

Additionally, the company is operating on a franchise basis. Hiring reps in specific locations and training them so you've got an in-area representative for questions, service and warm I'm-not-a-number fuzzy wuzzy feeling.

I haven't tested the service yet, but with storage being fairly standard on the data center side, your biggest variable here is likely to be your WAN connection. In the New York area, we're seeing problems lately even with dedicated T1 lines and DSL lines have turned into a regular crapshoot.

Oh, and DataPreserve is by no means the only off-site data backup company out there with an SMB-style service plan. Also check out:

BitLeap
Iron Mountain
US Data Trust
Intronis Technologies

And yes, there are a number of others, but I don't have time to list everyone. Shoot me.

Posted by Oliver Rist on August 2, 2006 01:43 PM

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