SMEs Offered Virtual Disaster Recovery Service

Information technology firm Weidenhammer announced is launching vRescue, an on-demand disaster recovery IT service aimed at providing small to medium-size businesses (SMBs) with business continuity solution via a fully-managed backup and recovery service that quickly restores critical applications and data.

Leveraging the power of the Internet and virtualisation technology, vRescue takes daily snapshots of mission critical applications and data which is encrypted and sent offsite to virtualised servers in a secured data centre that is SAS 70 Type II Certified. Since vRescue is fully-managed, the captured systems and applications are tested live daily, validating that they’ll work once the client needs to access them remotely and have their system restored, the company said.

“Traditionally, disaster recovery solutions have been too expensive or resource-intensive to be really viable for SMBs,” said company CEO John Weidenhammer. “vRescue changes that. It’s a cost-effective ‘business continuity plan’ to protect mission critical applications such as CRM, ERP and email ensuring that you don’t lose time and money due to an emergency or system outage.”

According to the U.S. Department of Labor, 40 percent of businesses never reopen following a disaster. The Association of Records Managers and Administrators cited 60 percent of businesses affected close within two years. Weidenhammer said it would partner with Plan B to offer the vRescue service to customers. Plan B is a U.K.-based company, specialising in disaster recovery solutions, that provides technology for remote backup and automated testing of virtualised server applications. “It’s the security of Wall Street at the cost of Main Street,” said Weidenhammer. “We have developed a video on our site to illustrate exactly how it helps businesses.”

From any Internet connection or phone, 24/7, client notification initiates the vRescue recovery process. After the notification, the vRescue service team walks the users through a process to recover their information. While the system is being fully restored, the client’s staff can access the recovery platform via the Internet and work from a current mirror image of their system that is located on Weidenhammer’s servers in the data centre.

“vRescue’s recovery infrastructure is hosted in one of Weidenhammer’s mission critical data centres, providing a secure environment that is SAS 70 Type II Certified and optimised for high availability and rapid recovery,” said Rick Finley, director of operations for vRescue at Weidenhammer. Finley said vRescue uses a unique server virtualisation technology that provides efficient backup, automated daily testing and validation, and rapid recovery, which in turn helps reduce the cost and complexity traditionally associated with disaster recovery support.