Disaster Preparedness
A Simple, Affordable Business Continuity Strategy
Today’s SMBs are faced with many challenges. Business continuity applications are crucial to a company’s survival. However, the start-up costs and the need for specialized IT staff sometimes prevent or delay a timely BC deployment until it is too late. Fortunately, today’s subscription-based service industry makes it easy and affordable to deploy a BC plan quickly. These solutions are generally referred to as SaaS (News - Alert) or cloud computing. Some service providers support reseller channels to make it even easier for SMBs to acquire these technologies.
GreenAppX is a good example and, as the name implies, offers green solutions. All enterprise applications are accessed through a browser over a user’s existing Internet connection. The company offers a wide range of choices, including best-of-breed applications from Microsoft, Research in Motion (News - Alert) (BlackBerry), Cisco and McAfee. Partnering with companies like AB&T Telecom allows GreenAppX to extend their solution portfolios even further yet retain the high level of security and reliability critical for a BC solution. When a customer’s business requirements change, they can simply add or cancel select services.
Subscription-based technology keeps start-up costs at a minimum and software applications now become a predictable monthly operating expense. Easy to budget, easy to implement and the time-to-deployment is very rapid.
Another advantage of subscription-based services is they are usually housed in secure, redundant data centers with SAS (News - Alert) 70 Type II compliance and 128-bit AES encryption. Full 24x7 IT support including patches, upgrades, version management tasks plus anti-virus and spam protection are generally included as standard features. Some companies, GreenAppX included, provide direct customer assistance, thus making the process even simpler for customers and resellers alike. IT
Max Schroeder is the senior vice president of FaxCore (News - Alert) Inc. (www.faxcore.com) and managing director of the DPCF.
Rich Tehrani is the president and group editor-in-chief at TMC (News - Alert), and conference chairman of ITEXPO.
