InternetA Disaster Recovery Plan for Small Business

Faced with overwhelming IT demands on a very small staff, one small business turned to a managed service provider.

It isn't easy adopting a comprehensive disaster recovery (DR) strategy if you are a small business. Memphis-based Lipscomb & Pitts Insurance LLC has a little more than 100 employees, so it can only afford to have one or two people in IT. "Although we had had two IT staff, one was more of a lower-level desktop support person, so in reality we only had one technically skilled network-based person," said Mike Yates, vice president of finance at Lipscomb and Pitts. "If he was out of the office, sick, had a sick child or was overwhelmed by service calls, everything else shut down." One guy backing up data for 100 staff and looking after a whole lot more besides was a recipe for failure. Factor in the demands of management to improve backup processes and add in greater DR protection, and it became obvious that something had to change. RELATED ARTICLES Backing Up on VMware Startup Makes Disaster Recovery Work For more stories on this topic: "We were not comfortable having one person responsible for all of our IT tasks, including data protection, because it was a potential liability in the event of a disaster," said Yates. The company decided to outsource its network infrastructure, data backup and support as well as the CIO role and ordering of new equipment. For that, it turned to masterIT LLC, a Bartlett, Tenn.-based managed services provider. It now has only one IT person who handles desktop support and special project... [ Read more on www.internetnews.com ]

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