Central Data Systems Blog

Have you ever checked exactly about how you would recover your IT system if there was a disaster?
Are you absolutely certain your data is being backed up properly, and more importantly, easily recoverable?
Do you know that many businesses overwrite good backups with bad, destroying the only recoverable version of data.

Disaster Recovery is critical to business. The days when you backed up to tape are now over. Even businesses with removable disk-drives are changing to more reliable solutions. It’s not just the physical technology which can fail, anything dependent on a manual human procedure can be missed or even worse, covered up.

Automated Offsite Backup (AOB) solutions allow your business to generate complete backups every night. There’s no tape or disk-drive media to change over, or manual procedure to physically remove the media offsite.  They give you complete visibility of backup data and the ability to restore it back with just a key-click. By layering only data which has changed over earlier versions of data, the AOB is able to re-construct every single backup ever taken over time and this access version history of older backups is a huge advantage if you suddenly discover an important directory was deleted weeks or months earlier.

Solutions can be scaled from simple to sophisticated depending upon your business needs.  For example re-building a file server from bare metal can take 2 days. With planning upfront this can be reduced to 90 minutes.

An Automated Offsite Backup for your system could be set up within a few hours. It’s very simple.   If you’re a new customer as for our free 2 hour consultation to set up a live demo of your own data and then just run it in parallel until you feel confident.

For a company that has been such a stable part of my life for almost 30 years, 2010 has been the most radical year every where we completely re-designed the company and executed a full culture upgrade.

I founded the company in 1982 writing business software, then expanding into an IT consultancy and Systems Integrator.   In 1995 we created a new technology platform that several years later the industry coined the term “Application Service Provider’ or ASP.   In 2005 we spun off GoPC.net and I moved with it to live in San Francisco/Silicon Valley in late 2007 just before the new “cloud computing” revolution began in mid 2008.  It’s been an incredible upward ride and with many eye-opening lessons.

So this year, we’ve reset out strategic goals and executed huge changes:

* New management
* New strategic focus –  its all about cloud.  Leveraging our unique position.
* New office – massive 675 sqm building at 88 Havelock Street.
* New team – with a broader focus on more virtualisation and emerging Cloud technologies.
* New Brand and logo  (brand consultants get very excited about such things)
* New website

This new blog will aim to provide a sprinkle of news updates along with technical advice and commentary on IT trends relevant to our clients.