UP TO 360,000 UK firms – including many small and medium sized enterprises - have no disaster recovery plans in place according to recent research.

Now IT leaders from Siemens’ SME specialist Solution 1 are urging them to look at new technical solutions and establish backups before it’s too late. The TDM Group who commissioned the research claimed that 21% of firms have no plans in place, and of the 79% that did, the provisions varied greatly. And Mick Hegarty, ICT General Manager for BT Business, recently told readers of web site startups.co.uk not to underestimate the importance of their data and explained that 70% of businesses who experience a major data loss go out of business within two years.

The statistics particularly relate to the SME sector, where resources are limited and IT is often overlooked. But despite these worrying facts, help is on the way for UK SMEs in the shape of new backup services launched by Solution 1.

A backup appliance is installed on site and then all company information is saved to it. Solution 1 then copies all the data on the appliance to its data centre where it is saved on tape. After this initial process adds and changes to the information on the appliance are backed-up via a secure high-speed connection overnight.

It offers smaller companies an affective way to ensure data is backed-up, duplicated and stored off site so they can recover 100% of their stored information, within 24 hours, whatever the crisis.

Solution 1’s managing director, Fraser Anderson, explained: “Limited IT budgets and busy owner managers at smaller companies often means data recovery is overlooked.

“Many SMEs, if they back data up at all, rely on CD back-ups and employees taking discs home to ensure copies are kept off the premises. This is a timely and costly way of performing back-ups and can often be overlooked if people are off sick or on holiday. Companies using tapes often keep using the same tape for to long and end up with a backup copy that is unusable and buying tapes regularly is very expensive.”

Solution 1 makes the initial investment, manages and maintains the appliance, which holds up to 10 gigabytes of information, backup services start at £40 per month.

Fraser added: “The backup service means there is a local backup facility to replace information lost on a laptop or pc, and also a remote backup if anything was to happen to the appliance or site itself. In cases like this we would deliver the backed-up data to the office on the next working day.”

Solution 1 provides the latest in communication and business applications, paid for on a per user per month basis and delivered from a highly secure, state-of-the-art central computer centre. For further information please visit www.solution1.co.uk

Ends

For further information, please contact:
Brian Dolby or Suzanne Aitken at GBCS PR on 0115 950 8399


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