Dear Client

Autumn is upon us and the first signs of a cold winter are breaking through. This, together with load shedding, potholes and protest marches happening in Tshwane as I am writing, paints a grey picture of our great nation. All of us as users of services delivered by 3rd parties are forced to make sure our businesses are affected as little as possible by others not doing their jobs. Our own story comes to mind in our Head Office move to Pretoria and having to set up our office so that our hardware can handle the electricity spikes associated with power outages, data security as well as physical security to cope with crime. We were robbed and even though the thieves made off with 6 computers we only lost a few hours of work. Barely a scratch compared with the potential loss if we did not have a good backup strategy for ourselves.

You may ask the question as to how is this related to the Med-e-Mass business and its influence in your life, my undertaking to you as a client and our responses and precautionary measures to ensure that you are okay in these difficult times. Well the answer is entangled in what is called taking responsibility, having a drive to maintain excellence in servicing, skills, determination and providing know how. A mouthful if one starts to dissect it…

Med-e-Mass, as part of a community of service providers has an obligation to ensure we do our utmost to protect, inform and assist you – our valued client, enabling you to deliver your service to your client in the most efficient manner. Part of this is to make sure that your systems running within your practice are built to withstand the spikes in power supply, drops in connectivity and on top of all of this, faulty back ups and or no back ups at all.

In a recent survey conducted by the IDG Research Services (as published in an article by Iron Mountain Digital), the top reasons for backing up data are disaster recovery (92%) and business continuity (85%), with a secondary focus on compliance and litigation risk mitigation (70%). This in itself tells a story – businesses have a responsibility to maintain data availability and to make sure that the latest possible back ups are available, correctly backed up and more importantly, correctly stored.

There are certain things that have to be considered before implementing a back up strategy, solution or process – one needs to decide what is important, what is critical and what is almost mandatory when it comes to your own environment, business and future. Some data differs from other data – the information life cycle, importance and purpose of the information throughout the cycle – even the sophistication of data management differs. Your specific back up strategy for your business should take these factors into account when deciding upon a process, solution or workflow. The answer does not lie in backing up, storing or archiving everything – one need to analyze, decide and focus on the types mentioned above. Basically, you place yourself and your business at risk if you do not think about this. There is a fine balance between negligence and over zealousness where costs (time, effort, hardware, software, etc) get out of hand.

The key lies in optimizing storage to suit your business needs and to maximize its effectiveness. Easier said than done? Contact us to make sure your business is following the correct procedures that you have a solid back up plan and the solution implemented is as optimized as possible. In short we will assist you in understanding what is needed to keep your business afloat when things fall to pieces around you. You owe it to yourself.

Until next month, happy practicing.

Gideon Brits
MD: Med-e-Mass

For assistance, on the various products, please do not hesitate to contact our National Call Centre at 0860 98 00 98