Cloud saves Little Rock business from devastating data loss

Thursday, December 22nd 2011 started out like any other day at Graham Smith Construction in Little Rock. But things quickly took a turn for the worse when the company’s critical business data suddenly became unavailable.

It is a nightmare scenario for any business to face. Office productivity grinds to a halt while stress levels quickly escalate to panic mode. But Carla Koen, office manager at Graham Smith Construction, knew exactly what to do. It was time to call ScaleIT.

In the summer of 2011, Graham Smith Construction contracted with ScaleIT to provide managed IT support. Now the ultimate test of that arrangement was at hand.

Scale had set up the office network storage device, including a data mirroring function to keep an exact copy of all data on two separate hard drives. Normally, this configuration would be enough to keep the office productive while technicians correct problems. But this failure was not normal.
A hardware failure had taken both the main data store and the mirror copy offline. The company’s entire operation was now at risk.

Fortunately, Scale had planned ahead. While mirrored drives are an excellent way to keep company data safe and accessible, a failure of the RAID controller can lead to this exact scenario.

When Scale first recommended a cloud-based off-site data backup, Graham Smith, owner of Graham Smith Construction, was a little bit skeptical. After all, he was investing in a fully mirrored solution. But, in the end, the economics of the cloud solution made good sense. So, the cloud backup system was put in place.

Now, with the hard drives out of commission, it was up to the cloud backup to save the day. Within hours, the Scale team had restored the most critical data, and got their office staff back to work. The remaining 25 gigabytes of business data were soon fully restored.

“It’s the best $25 I’ve ever spent” remarked Graham Smith about the cloud backup plan he had purchased from Scale.

What could have been a major disaster turned out to be a minor inconvenience. All thanks to a well-engineered and executed data backup and recovery plan from Scale.