Small businesses that want to save money (a major concern during a recession), as well as hassle (a major concern anytime), should look to the heavens — specifically, the clouds. Or rather, “the cloud,” that ethereal place on the Internet that will eventually supply all our data and computing needs.
The cloud is ready for prime time, says Henry Broodney of InGrid Networks, which has come up with perhaps the first low-cost, enterprise-level system-recovery application/platform for small- and medium-sized businesses.
Usually, it’s hard to find sentences in which the terms “small business” and “enterprise level” are used together. Hardware, software and service companies offer all sorts of enterprise-level products and services — because enterprises can afford to pay big money for those items. As a result, administrators of corporate data centers and networks can avail themselves of all sorts of backup, duplication, replication and recovery schemes, with data stored on site, off site, underground or across the sea, depending on the system’s parameters and the company’s needs.
Products designed for data recovery leave no stone unturned, ensuring large organizations — who can afford to pay for privilege — the ability to get back online within minutes of a disruptive event, like an earthquake, terrorist attack, etc. With a recovery system in place, workers can be moved to other sites and pick right up where they left off almost immediately, ensuring that the business — and income flow — continues.
Unfortunately for the small-business person — the accountant, the lawyer, the graphic artist — enterprise solutions that allow them to immediately recover from major outages are out of the question, mostly because of the cost. Instead, most small businesses rely on file backup — copying important files to CDs, or uploading them to an online backup server, like http://mozy.com/, or even using Google Docs (http://docs.google.com/),…