View of flood in downtown Calgary, Alberta, Canada in June 2013
The value of having offsite computer systems was seen during the flood of 2013
Many Canadian businesses suffered extensive physical damage from the Alberta Flood of 2013. Others, while not suffering any physical damage, were severely impacted by loss of access to their systems. While businesses in High River, Alberta and other areas were literally washed away in some cases, others like the ones located in downtown Calgary, were denied access to their systems through the loss of power due to flood waters affecting power transformers. A number of our Dynamics NAV and Dynamics CRM customers were affected by the flood but two in particular stand out as examples of the value of having your computer systems maintained in secure offsite locations. One client in High River was up and running the next day due to having redundant systems available and was hard at work helping victims mitigate the effects of the flood. A large client in downtown Calgary just had to ask their staff to work from home remotely until power was restored to offices while other companies found themselves with unproductive staff for over a week until the transformers could be remediated.
Sometimes people get confused about the difference between hosted environments and cloud-based systems. While both typically do offer offsite and redundant storage, hosted systems allow in-house licensed systems to be maintained by a hosting provider, who looks after disaster recovery and backups. Cloud-based systems offer the same hardware and systems protection but are usually licensed on a per user per month charge. Both provide the redundancy to survive an event such as this and are viable options. Having a hosted or cloud-based system can be viewed as purchasing insurance for your business and its most valuable and irreplaceable asset, your information.
by Open Door Technology, Inc. Manitoba, Canada Microsoft Dynamics Partner