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Getting started with an IT disaster recovery plan is now very affordable (as low as $9.95/mo) and easier than ever. There is no reason that any company that is highly dependent on electronic data should not have an in-depth IT disaster recovery plan, as it is no longer only applicable to the largest corporations. Right now, over 75% of small and medium businesses do not have a complete disaster recovery plan, and we want to fix that. We want you to be prepared for the worst and are here to walk you through the entire process. Just contact our support department at support@steadfast.net to get started today. Just as you wouldn’t drive without auto insurance, you shouldn’t take the risk with your business and operate without a disaster recovery plan.
First, what is a disaster? If you’re not in an area prone to hurricanes, tornados, flooding, or earthquakes you may be thinking there is little need for a disaster recovery plan, but that isn’t the case. In fact, only a small percent of disaster recovery needs stem from natural disasters. The largest cause of data loss is mechanical/hardware malfunction or failure (44%), with the second largest cause being human error (32%) followed by software corruption/failure (14%) and computer viruses (7%) with natural disasters account for only 3% data loss. A hard drive fails every 15 seconds, a computer is infected with a virus every 15 seconds, a laptop is lost or stolen once every 40 seconds (over half of all data is only kept on user systems), and major data loss due to hacking happens to a small or medium business three times a day. These are every day occurrences that you need to be prepared for in addition to the possibility of a catastrophic natural disaster or terrorist attack.
Then, what is the cost of data loss? The cost of major data loss could be your entire business, as 75% of small businesses that had no disaster recovery plan, go out of business within 3 years of a disaster. This statistic can become clearly evident once you look at the amount of data your company relies upon on a daily basis, customer information, marketing information, invoices, financial data/records, payroll data, media files, vendor records, email/communications, planning diagrams, and the list is nearly endless. For most businesses it would take many days, weeks, or months to restore this sort of data from scratch, if it can even be reassembled. Over this time, your employees are unable to properly serve customers, your customers will begin looking at your competitors, you will not be able to produce your products/services, and you likely still won’t recover all the data in the end. This loss of time, resources, and customers can be devastating for any business.
Now, how do you prevent data loss? The easiest place to start is simply analyzing the critical data in your business and taking off site (you do not want your backup to be destroyed in the same power incident, burglary, or natural disaster as your primary data) backups of that data. With Steadfast and our multiple data centers, you can get off-site hourly backups (we recommend making backups at least daily, but hourly is even better) of your data for less than $10/mo (for 20GB of data), and as your data needs increase, we can support almost an infinite number of systems (critical data could be spread across hundreds of backend servers or thousands of end user systems) and thousands of terabytes of data. This will assure you that you always have a copy of your data in a highly reliable and secure (SSAE16 audited) Steadfast data center, so if something happens to your primary data, you will still be able to retrieve it. This data can be encrypted to assure your security requirements are met and we can support almost infinite retention schedules, allowing you to keep hourly, daily, weekly, monthly, and annual backups. If you need any help determining how much backup space you need, what data you should be backing, what backup schedule you should be running, or just need general pricing information our staff is more than happy to assist! Contact support@steadfast.net or call us at 888-281-9449.
Now that I have my backups, how do I recover from a data loss event? Since all of Steadfast’s backup services are done to live disks you will always have access to your backup data over the Internet, 24/7/365. Wherever you are, whenever you need it, the data is immediately available to you. There is no need to wait hours or days for a tape backup or hard drive to be called from storage (and then hoping it was stored properly and still works) or to go to one specific physical location. If this data needs to be restored to a server, we always have servers in stock and could have you up and running on new servers (as little as $99.95/mo), with your restored data, within hours. In addition, if you need local access to the data, our data centers are open and staffed 24/7. How the data needs to be restored can often depend on your needs and the situation, but here at Steadfast we assure you have the utmost flexibility with fast Internet access, physical and virtual server (support for VMWare, Xen, KVM, and Hyper-V) options, local access, and even full geographic diversity to allow for almost live replication/restoration. Talk with our knowledgeable staff via email at support@steadfast.net or on the phone at 888.281.9449 and we can assure you can get things back to normal as quickly as possible.
I can’t go through all of the options, possibilities, and planning in this one post, but hopefully this has gotten you thinking about implementing or improving your existing IT disaster recovery plans. Disaster recovery services aren’t out of reach, we can make them affordable (as low as $9.95/mo for shared resources or $284.95/mo for dedicated resources) and easy for you. To keep your company going strong into the future, you need to prepare for the good, as well as the bad, and the team here at Steadfast can help you prepare for both. Even if you’re currently not a customer, please contact us our support department at support@steadfast.net and we’ll help you establish an IT disaster recovery plan at no charge.
At Steadfast we're proud to be a company made up of individual free thinkers that are respectful of differing opinions and viewpoints. We value the perspective and experiences of our entire staff knowing they all add up to make Steadfast the fantastic company it is today.
This was recently sent to our employees but we wanted to share it with you as well. In light of some companies trying to influence their staff to vote in certain ways by threatening changes in company direction based on this year's election outcome, we wanted to be sure our staff knew they had the freedom to vote however they wanted and that they had nothing to fear. Karl Zimmerman, our CEO sent the following out:
Vote Next week Tuesday is Election Day, but don’t wait until then to vote.
Take advantage of Illinois early voting, which is open right now. Here’s a list of early voting locations: http://www.elections.state.il.us/votinginformation/earlyvotinglocations.aspx
You can also visit https://www.google.com/elections/ed/us/vote to get early voting locations, your Election Day polling place, and a ballot summary outlining the races you can vote for. If you did not already register to vote, you can still register and vote up through November 3rd, read more at http://www.chicagoelections.com/page.php?id=14
We would encourage all of our employees to vote, no matter which way you’re voting. As a company, we will not tell you how to vote, the company’s best interest is that the will of our employees be heard at the voting booth, whatever that is. This is an important election, the policies that are set by our government impact each of us personally as individuals, but it has little to no affect as to how Steadfast does business.
Whoever gets elected, it will not matter to Steadfast (Does it matter to me personally? Yes, but I have my own vote). If our taxes are increased, it will do absolutely nothing to affect our future plans, our hiring practices, or employee salaries. If our taxes go down, that doesn’t mean our plans will change and we’ll begin hiring more people or expanding significantly. No matter what happens to health care legislation, we will provide all of our employees with quality health care, whether or not it is required or subsidized. Our business is not run on the whims of politicians, it is built on you, our team. Politics will not dictate how we care for our team and customers and that is what we have built our business around.
We've made it over the hump of the economic downturn, it wasn't always easy, but we're here, stronger than ever. That helped prove the tenacity, agility, and flexibility of this company. If legislators want to change the business landscape, bring it on, we’re ready. We have our plans and goals set for years to come, minor changes in tax law or legislation will not change that. I am confident in the strength and growth of this company, no matter who is President, who controls Congress, or who runs the state legislature.
Now go out and vote for your own self-interests, don’t worry about Steadfast, we’re fine either way.
Karl Zimmerman
Chicago, IL (PRWEB) October 28, 2012
Steadfast, a data center services provider based out of Chicago and New York with server management, disaster recovery and cloud hosting has been chosen as the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater's College of Business and Economics data host for its online streaming. "This partnership underlines how important managed services and 24/7 accessibility to content is in academia," says Joe Bong, Chief Revenue Officer for Steadfast.
The largest business school in Wisconsin, the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater has been making video recordings since its online MBA (Masters of Business Administration degree) program's inception in 1999. In 2004 all of the media went online and in 2009 they implemented a college-wide lecture recording system that allows faculty to make recordings directly from their classrooms. This has resulted in a total of over 5000 videos. Now in 2012 they are outsourcing all of their multimedia hosting and streaming to Steadfast and their Cloud Hosting platform.
"Our Campus' datacenter has provided reliable service for years during the workday, but our students are located around the world." says Aaron Schuett, Technical Coordinator at UWW. "Just because it's midnight in Wisconsin doesn't mean a student in China shouldn't be able to view their course material. With Steadfast, we have a team working 24x7 to keep our College running. With the number of students we have that are located outside the US, uptime is critical."
Steadfast provides Managed Data Center services to a wide array of clients from educational to financial institutions and their Cloud Platform was a perfect fit for UW-Whitewater's needs for reliable high availability, high performance streaming solution. Joe Bong says, "At the end of the day Steadfast made the most sense as we offer around-the-clock feet on the floor support, flexibility and scalability."
More about UW-Whitewater: Since 1868, UW-Whitewater has provided an exceptional learning experience for its students. We're proud of our history and excited about our future. For more information on UW-Whitewater go to http://www.uww.edu/
More about Steadfast: For over 14 years, Steadfast has been delivering the highest quality IT infrastructure services to its clients, including cloud solutions (public, private, and hybrid), dedicated servers, disaster recovery and managed colocation services. Find Steadfast Networks online at http://www.steadfast.net
Built In Chicago recently published their top 100 digital companies in Chicago and lo and behold Steadfast is listed! This should come as no surprise to anyone that knows Steadfast as we've been an established hot company in Chicago for quite a while but the recognition is always nice to see. Steadfast represents the ever increasing move to the cloud for so many companies, small to large. Maintaining your own IT infrastructure is fast becoming too expensive and far more trouble than it's worth, so Steadfast makes perfect sense for moving your infrastructure. With flexible, affordable hybrid solutions that allow you to leverage our dedicated server offerings and cloud hosting with your own colocated equipment Steadfast can tie together an infrastructure plan that makes sense both logically and fiscally.
Chicago is an established powerhouse of IT. With data centers at both 725 S Wells and 350 E Cermak, Steadfast has facilities and the networks that other companies just can't claim. We do it better, cheaper and faster than those other guys and being a part of the top 100 digital companies in Chicago proves it. Thanks to Built In Chicago for the inclusion and thanks to Chicago for helping Steadfast become one of the hottest IT infrastructure companies around!
See the list at: http://www.builtinchicago.org/blog/the-100-companies
Steadfast has recently upgraded the Continuous Data Protection Backup Services offering. Drastic changes to the product have shown to dramatically increase its value and we're proud to be able to offer it to our clients.
The biggest changes between the previous CDP 2.0 version and this latest CDP 4.0 is a big increase in its disaster recovery abilities. It's more robust and can withstand full OS crashes and power loss. Its resiliency is a big part of why we felt the need to upgrade our offerings. Another big upside is improved replication and restore performance, as well as it being more resistant to file system fragmentation. What this means to you is in the event of catastrophic data loss your ability to get back online with less downtime is increased manyfold with CDP 4.0.
Other changes we've seen include new compression technology, a rewrite in the C programming language which offers significant performance increases over the old Java implementation and asynchronous I/O taking advantage of the latest Windows 2008 R2 and Linux 2.6 kernel technology for the fastest possible throughput during replication and bare-metal restore.
We're very excited to be able to offer CDP 4.0 starting today and invite you to contact our sales department at sales@steadfast.net with any questions and to get started. Thanks for choosing Steadfast!
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