The Scary State of SMB Disaster Recovery Plans

Like the Classic 80's Glam Rock Hair Band Cinderella once said in the title of a hit song, "Don't know what you got till it's gone".

According to MSPmentor.net this morning:

Compounding this generally poor backup of virtual servers by SMBs are figures showing that 23 percent of SMBs lack an offsite backup strategy, while more than four in 10 (42 percent) use manual backup procedures such as tape or disk, as opposed to automated backup. Only one-fifth (21 percent) of SMBs back up to the cloud. The cloud only represents 19 percent of the total global SMB IT infrastructure, although one in four SMBs (26 percent) say their infrastructure will be more than half cloud-based by the end of the year.

You can read the rest of Dan Berthiaume's article on MSPmentor.net

How Virtualization Increased IT's Value At One SMB

As virtualization becomes more and more a standard and commodity at a rapid rate, the benefits now start to show immensely in the SMB Marketplace. ROI figures, once perceived as smoke and mirror gibberish by snake oil sales teams, now clearly start to show its value within a few months. It's these kinds of stories that are really going to change perception of SMB owners from looking at IT as a "Cost Center" but more as a "Business Value Partner" (this will be a recurring theme you will hear from me often in this blog). 

Read how "Acorda Therapeutics overhauled its approach to infrastructure and disaster recovery out of sheer necessity. In doing so, IT reaped an unintended benefit: it became more important to the business"

For an SMB, the value in the right investment and strategy saved them a substantial amount of money in a very short time:

The financial ROI is the stuff of vendor sales pitches. From a hardware perspective, Acorda would have spent $1 million or so in servers and related costs to keep up with its growth, according to Bauer. Instead, it spent $65,000 on the physical servers needed to operate its virtual infrastructure. On the DR front, Acorda had to make an initial investment of $50,000. But it now spends $40,000 per year on DR instead of $100,000 annually in its previous tape-based environment. Bauer notes the company achieved ROI on the DR project in less than a year, and will continue to save $60,000 annually.

Here is the full article: How Virtualization Increased IT's Value At One SMB