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Case Study | Cost Effective IT Service

We had a potential client bring us in to look over their systems and estimate the replacement of all their workstations. As part of the free network assessment, we discovered the previous IT company had talked the owner into a backup plan that exceeded $500/month.

This overly robust backup plan was copying the entire server to a dedicated workstation each night and that copy was then uploaded offsite. The idea was that if the server failed, the client would be able to restore the copy and they’d be up and running faster.

There were a couple of problems with this strategy.

First, if the server has a hardware failure, you’re going to be waiting 24-48hrs for replacements parts during which time you could simply download and restore a normal, offsite backup. There was no need for a full copy of the server.

Second, the cost was beyond absurd. The previous IT company was reselling this backup service and therefore they were able to pocket a portion of that monthly expense. Spending $500/month comes out to $6k/yr. Over a 5-year period, you may or may not have a server failure and if you do, it’s going to take time to repair the server. And if that’s the case, spending $30k over 5 years to TRY and shave a few hours off the process wasn’t too logical for this particular company.

I asked the owner how much money she would lose if her server was down for a day or more. She thought about it and said that she wouldn’t lose much, less than a couple thousand dollars. It would be an inconvenience if the server went down, but ultimately the office could still do most of their work and easily make up any lost time resulting from a failed server.

The decision was simple. Why spend $30,000.00 over 5 years to protect against a failure that would only cost you $2k? Nobody would do this.

We set her up with secure, offsite, encrypted backups that ran nightly, and we monitored them to ensure the client was protected. Even after the client added our monitoring and maintenance service combined with the new offsite backups, she was still spending less money than she was on her old backups alone.

The company now receives more support, better support, for less money. Her company has been humming along ever since. They’re a great client and we love taking care of them.

Please note:

The changes and services for this client would not be a match for all businesses. Some businesses absolutely need to avoid any possible downtime. They need to keep spare hardware on the shelf in case of failure, they need to have an imaged server, and they lose significantly more money (or even clients) when they’re down. Each solution is customized to the client.