What’s more expensive: $2000 or $100?

Last month a major storm hit Toronto. Housing and vegetation weren’t damaged, but it did affect the power grid. As a result, a customer had a power surge that evening, and when they came into the office the next morning they realized that the surge had fried two routers, a switch, a PC, and a printer.

They were not using any backups, but luckily Lenovo was able to repair the computer and restore all the data. Unfortunately, it still cost them a lot of time and aggravation to get everything up and running again. If the device had been damaged beyond repair they would have lost some of their critical business data. Additionally, an employee was unable to work, their internet was down, and they couldn’t print – all directly hurting their bottom line.

Moreover, all the peripheral hardware had to be replaced. The cost of replacing and installing the hardware was about $2000, for a fairly minor disaster. A large power surge could easily fry an entire network.

These damages could have been prevented with the use of a UPS. UPS stands for Uninterruptible Power Supply and is a backup power source. A UPS will keep your computers up and running during a power outage, so when the power comes back on it doesn’t cause a surge. You can buy a small UPS capable of keeping a desktop PC on for up to 30 minutes for as little as $100.

We’re huge believers in the important of having a UPS for every piece of critical hardware as a precautionary measure. Without cloud backup and a UPS you could lose not only a computer, but all the critical data stored on it. If the person in charge of accounting, or payroll, or design loses all there data how would your organization cope?

A UPS represents a small, one-time cost, while cloud backup is a month to month subscription. You may be thinking “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”, and I completely understand that opinion, but it’s simply not safe to operate your business without “insurance” against disasters. You wouldn’t allow your business to operate without adequate business insurance, so don’t leave your business vulnerable to data loss and hardware failure by neglecting cloud backup and power protection.