A Cautionary Tale:
A couple of weeks ago I was speaking with a colleague and swapping “war stories.” Here’s one he told me, about his experience doing some work for a local Toronto business. It’s a perfect example of learning a hard lesson about the importance of adequate backup.
A couple of months ago, the client had phased out its last Windows 2003 server in anticipation of Microsoft discontinuing support. But that left them with only one Active Directory server on their network. Unfortunately, that server failed one fateful weekend.
They had secure cloud backups for all of their critical data. And they had fully planned to install a backup Active Directory server; but they just hadn’t gotten around to it. Without a backup of Active Directory it required a complete rebuild of their directory, from the ground up. That meant reinstalling software and re-creating users, mailboxes, profiles, etc. It took many hours of work before they were fully up and running.
Frankly, they were lucky: they had data backups, and they were on a Managed Services contract so their only additional cost was the replacement of the disk drive that failed. But what about the indirect cost? Having no functional network or email for days on end wound up costing them thousands in lost productivity.
The irony is that it would have taken just a couple of hours to completely avoid this issue, if they had taken the proper steps a few weeks ago. Because every hard lesson should also be a teachable moment, we want to share 2 important lessons with you:
- Make absolutely sure that you have either a backup Active Directory server, or, at least, a current backup of your Active Directory data.
- Test your backups regularly to make 100% certain that you can recover your data if you actually need it!
If you're interested, take a look at our offer "Backup Audit Promotion: Protect Your Data!" that should help you sleep peacefully, knowing that your IT environment is really disaster-proof
