An interruption to your business doesn’t have to be catastrophic to cause a loss of revenue. Even a power outage can have its consequences. Hitches and hiccups have to be planned for because, when they happen, valuable time is spent finding and fixing the problem. Don’t underestimate the expense of downtime—idle employees and diminished service to customers are high costs. Take a boy scout’s advice, and be prepared.
There are a variety of approaches to business continuance and the one you choose will depend on the size of your company, the type of business you run, and what functions you deem to be essential. The safest solution, if you absolutely can’t afford downtime, might be a fully redundant data center that you can switch to during an interruption. This offers high availability and can practically negate the effects of most hiccups. Smaller businesses, however, often require a more cost-effective answer. To [...]

The phrase, “I wish I had access to that data!” is never a good sign. It might be the final nail in the coffin of a missed opportunity, the lament following a lost sale, or a blow to out-of-office productivity. But there is a solution! Summit Technology helps businesses to establish a Virtual Desktop Infrastructure, a form of virtualization that is ideal for remote sales teams and branch offices. It can ensure that they have access to data and applications when they need them, instead of just wishful thinking!
Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) refers to the process of employing virtual machines (VMs) to run desktop operating systems and applications. The VMs are centralized on servers in the data center, which allows them to be upgraded, patched, secured, and maintained efficiently and conveniently. Employees are then able to directly access the VMs from existing PCs or from thin clients, even when they’re [...]

Schools, hospitals, hotels, and office buildings all have fire escape plans or emergency exit contingencies. The routes are posted in almost every room, signs caution against using elevators, and smoke detectors are placed to give the most possible warning. Fire drills are conducted regularly to ensure everyone knows where to go and what to do in an emergency. Countless lives have been saved because of these guidelines.
Savvy business leaders and IT professionals know that a disaster can endanger an entire company. Researchers at the University of Texas indicate that, following a calamitous loss of data, 43% of businesses don’t even reopen, 51% shut down within two years, and only 6% survive beyond that. Those are convincing numbers. Is your enterprise willing to gamble on that? If not, then it’s crucial to have a disaster recovery plan in place.
Some small businesses think that “disaster recovery” is just a matter of making [...]

Whether it’s a brand new Ferrari convertible or a 15-year old station wagon, there are two primary ways to maintain your vehicle. You can follow the recommended schedule of oil changes, tune ups, and tire rotations to keep it at peak performance, or you can drive it until it breaks down on the side of the road and have it towed to the shop. The same is true of your computer network. Will you choose the small costs of computer health maintenance, or the price tags and inconvenience of emergency-based service?
If you’re still reading, you probably selected the first option. Summit Technology offers a variety of services and solutions to keep your computers running smoothly, but today we’ll focus on PlateSpin Protect. PlateSpin defends your workloads, both physical and virtual, through live incremental replication, a process that reduces network usage by recognizing and replicating updates, instead of entire databases. There [...]