World Backup Day 2018

World Backup Day is an event on the technology calendar setup to raise awareness and to remind us all about the importance of backing up our data. Everyone of us knows why we need to backup. The reality is that many businesses do not have a reliable backup system in place that is sufficient to be able to recover their data in a disaster.

What would you do if you lost everything?

Or, what would your business do? With 40% of all UK businesses suffering a cyber attack in the past 12 months, the threat of data loss is significant. However, hardware failures and human error continue to be the leading causes of data loss. The only way to ensure your business can recover, and continue to trade, is by ensuring you have a robust backup plan.

So let’s define exactly what backup is (and isn’t).

“Backup is when you have a second copy of your data stored in another location, in case the original is lost or damaged”

Backup is NOT storing your data in Dropbox.
It is also not copying the data to an external driver that is permanently connected to your PC.

What are the methods of backing up?

You can choose to backup your data to another local source. An external hard drive that is then removed and stored securely offsite. You can also opt to backup to the Cloud.

As always there are pros and cons, so let’s take a look:

Some things to ask yourself…

• What important data does my business store?
• Are we backing up all our data or only key parts?
• What would be the impact of a major data loss for 1 day? (loss of sales, cost of staff, rent etc)
• How long could we suffer a major data loss before it had a negative impact on my business?
• What is our current backup strategy?
• How long would it take to recover our data?
• Is our data protected from ransomware infections?

At m3 Networks, backup is at the forefront of our minds. Every. Single. Day. We take away the worry about data backup. We work with the leading backup solution providers to give our customers the very best solutions, so that they have the confidence that their business data is safe. If you would like to discuss how we can help protect your business, call us today on 01738237001.

5 Benefits of Fixed IT Costs

When you are looking for business IT support, you can find various types of contracts and agreements. You could just decide to Pay As You Go (break/fix) basis, pay in advance for blocks of hours, or choose a fixed price IT support contract which includes the majority, if not all, the things your business will need on a monthly basis.

The biggest benefit of a fixed price model, is that you know exactly how much your IT support costs will be each month. This is great for cash flow and essentially your IT costs just become another commodity – just like paying your rent, electricity and insurance. But there are some other major benefits that you may not have realised.

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Can your IT provider prove how good they are?

We are delighted and very proud to shout from the rooftops that our overall customer satisfaction score for 2017 was a staggering 98.7%!

Industry averages are around 93%, so we’re outperforming most of our competition. All IT companies will say they provide amazing service, but how many can actually prove it?

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Our new website is live!

We’re delighted to finally launch our brand spanking, super-duper, shiny new website! It’s been a while coming. Our last one had been running for more years than I can remember. The feedback we received was always positive though, so it served it’s purpose.

Since our last website we have grown a lot as an outsourced IT support provider. We’ve moved to larger premises. We’ve employed more staff. We have vehicles. We’re continuing to offer new IT support services to customers. The time was right to launch a new-look website. It is much cleaner, brighter, and the content fills more of the screen. It is so much easier to read.

We all think it looks awesome. Please leave a comment and let us know what you think?

Regards,

Mark Riddell