Power Protection FEATURED ARTICLE

As any accountant will tell you (and trust me, I am the daughter of a CPA so I know these things), the next few days are crunch time for accountants. We are talking coffee every hour, pencils being run to the stubs, calculators being smashed against walls and pizza being scarfed down ferociously. Because even with a two-day extension until April 17 to file, there still exists only a few more hours of that painful tax season.

With every minute counting for an accountant and 24 hours not being enough hours in the day to get everything done, nothing can be more disastrous to accountants than a bout of downtime caused by a power outage or fluke occurrence. To date, tax professionals have already filed more than 50 million returns this year but their busiest time of work is now upon them and ensuring uptime is more critical than ever.

An unplanned outage can not only give accountants massive migraines and panic attacks that they won’t get everything done in time, but it can also mean the loss of mission-critical applications and server disaster. In fact, 50 percent of companies have had their reputations damaged to some extent by IT outages and downtime can cost a company an average e of $150,000 per year. According to industry experts, the average company experiences 14 hours of IT downtime per year, but despite these scary statistics, 28 percent of companies haven't tested their backup plans, and more than three-quarters have found tape backup failures.

But for some, guaranteeing uptime is a necessity, particularly as we come to the end of tax season.

"Keeping our network and server running smoothly is very important to us," said Marvin Rubio, IT manager of Fenner, Melstrom & Dooling (FMD), PLC, an accounting and financial consulting firm based in Birmingham, Mich. "We used to utilize tape backup, and if a server went down with our previous system, it could have taken up to three days to bring it back online. That would have caused a grave interruption to the service that we provide our clients. Now we use the QuorumLabs(R) onQ(TM) recovery solution, and we can be back up in minutes."

QuorumLabs, a company that develops technologies and products that provide high availability and instant recovery of critical business systems for small to mid-sized companies, allows business to continually and automatically test their recovery plans and recover failed systems through power protection units.

Another company that stands ready to help you stay up during tax season is Minuteman UPS/Para Systems (News - Alert), a provider of power protection technologies. In fact, for the remainder of this month, Minuteman is offering instant rebates on some of its most valued products including the EnterprisePlus and Endeavor Series UPSs.

“We chose to feature the EnterprisePlus and Endeavor Series because we feel that these units provide a tremendous combination of features and value not typically found in these higher levels of UPSs,” Duston Nixon, marketing communications specialist for Minuteman, told TMCnet. “These units are ideal for mission-critical applications, and we want to help show that this doesn’t have to mean breaking the budget to have ample power protection.”

For more about Minuteman’s power protection units, click here.