Should I just use Bob that works for me for my IT Advice?

Posted By: Claire Wednesday 2nd May 2018

Should I just use Bob that works for me for my IT Advice?

Many companies are in a situation where they believe that outsourcing an IT company will impact there bottom line. Using a person that works for them with a different role will accommodate the business needs.

Think of it this way, would you employ a plumber to perform brain surgery? The impact would be catastrophic if they got it wrong!!  It is no different to an IT System.  If your backups were never setup and monitored correctly, think about the loss of earnings it would impact within the business.  This is a domino effect, where it impacts one area of the business and cascades down the line.

Within our industry we have experienced many weird and wonderful ways of configuring infrastructures and systems.  Yes, they may work initially but what of the outcome if the “What If?” happens.  Unfortunately many implementations of IT systems have one focus and that is to get it working, rather than thinking about the long term aspect of the configuration.

Recently, we took over a client that was catered by one of our rivals, they had issues over emails and loss of data. The company they were using consisted of 2 technicians that catered for 30 clients, so when there was a problem with more than one client it became a significant delay in resolving the issues.  A situation happened when the client received a Crypto virus infection on their network, this is one of the worst fears for any business as the wrong infrastructure would lead to considerable down time or even loss of data.

So, in this instance, we have 24 machines unable to access any data, there for 24 paid members of staff are unable to be productive, the response of this issue took 6 hours to deal with it, because the 2 technicians were over stretched. The conclusion was that they had to restore from a backup from the previous night, so all work prior to the virus contamination was lost between the previous backup and the outbreak.

You may think, well they should be up and running once the backup has been fully restored.  The outcome was unfortunately, their backups were offsite, which was great but located in North America with a download speed of 10meg.  Now let’s do the maths, they have 2.9TB of data and the download is at 10meg per minute, so 2900000 meg data size @ 10meg per minute / 600meg per hour equals 4833hours or 201days to download.  Then you may think jumping onto a faster broadband connection would do a better job.  So let’s say downloading on a 100meg line, therefore 6000meg an hour which equals 483 hours or 21 days.

Either way you look at it, it could bankrupt a business.  They had to send a member of staff over to the data centre where the data was held to restore it onto a drive and bring it back to the UK.  This took 7 days then a further 24 hours to restore it on the servers.  Now the point that I am trying to emphasise on is this situation is the lack of knowledge behind a system that has been implemented.  There are many applications that will do what you require, but it’s the time it takes to do it, that is the crucial element within any design.  It’s no better than having “Bob” who works in Sales to advise you on a package that will do the job.

Having an IT team, with qualified advice, that presents a tested solution is invaluable within any organisation, getting the wrong advice leads to considerable disruption especially when “Company Data is at stake”.

The outcome of the situation; the IT company blamed the backup company for not giving the full facts on the restore.  The backup company said you should have done a test restore to simulate a disaster to evaluate the time needed.  Meanwhile the company is seeking legal action on the income lost through this exercise.

 

 

 

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