Computer disasters can happen to anyone. You're working late on an assignment, and poof....the dreaded Blue Screen of Death (BSOD). We've all been there. There are plenty of cloud technologies today that can help us with our most critical pieces of data. Dropbox, Microsoft Skydrive, Google Drive are all free technologies for users who can sync their data in the cloud to multiple devices.

In business, we need specific technologies to protect ourselves. Our Chicago IT Consulting Firm specializes in Chicago IT Online Data Backups as well as Chicago IT Business Disaster Recovery Solutions. What are the key differences? And how can they benefit your business?

Online Data Backups - For servers, the System State and crucial data are backed up according to a custom schedule into the cloud. The data is highly encrypted and only accessible by you in the event that data needs to be restored. Data Retention levels are customized to the specific businesses. For example, your business may only need 30 days of backups for one folder. However, a law firm may need seven (7) years. The backups are managed daily by our Chicago Managed IT Services team.

Business Disaster Recovery Solutions - BDR solutions are becoming more mainstream in the SMB market. Today, our team can implement specific appliances on your network that will accept full snapshots of your servers for bare metal recovery, individual files, and virtualized continuity. What do we mean by "Virtualized continuity?" Imagine your server, every hour, cloning itself onto another device. Suppose that your server goes down for any reason. The backup device (BDR) will mount the latest cloned image as a virtual server. While your production server is being repaired, you will be able to work on the backed up, cloned, virtual server. Even more impressive, this BDR will replicate to another one in the cloud which will protect your business from natural disasters and theft. In contrast to the traditional online backup, the BDR solution will save you time from having to rebuild your entire network before the data restore.

Every business should do something to protect its most precious asset - its data. Contact our Chicago IT Services sales team for more information on how we can help you protect your business.