Ready for an Industry Expert to look over plans to ensure everything will work?

You do not want to “learn these lessons” yourself!

In the last 10 years or so we have done disaster recovery from tornadoes, fires, floods, roof collapse, theft of a server, theft of a backup drive (thief broke out the window in client’s car), all manner of drive failures, raid failures and even nasty things like hackers and ransomware.  I’ve come behind a routine server upgrade that went badly and cost my company $70,000 to make right and I have personally paid a $40,000 ransom to get a client’s data back.   I have hundreds of thousands of dollars of “lessons learned” that you do not want to learn your self.

When the backups fail and the entire business comes to a halt things get VERY tense.  I’ve seen an IT guy so stressed from failing to do backups before a disaster that he considered suicide (He left the area and changed industries) and I’ve seen owners sell their business because they couldn’t rebuild all the data.  I’ve even seen the police arrest and charge a business owner for “failure to keep records” after a data loss.  Backups are a huge responsibility for every business and even more so for Dental offices. Dentists have a legal responsibility to protect their Patient Health Information.  If your unencrypted server or backup drive is stolen,  first the HIPAA enforcement office out of Dallas will conduct an investigation that will result in a 6 figure fine and then the board will eat you alive.

Is this you…

Some practice owners do their own backups, train the office manager to do them or just outsource the role completely to the vendor.  I’m not going to say that this is a recipe for disaster, but  I will say that EVERY disaster I have encountered that went very badly for the owner, all had these same ingredients.

OK sean, what’s the solution?

First, you need us to do an Audit.  It is free, we identify all your data, including PHI that is hiding on your reconstruction machines, office desktops, consult rooms, OPS, etc.  Second, we work on a remediation plan to get as much of this data onto the Server is possible.  Third, we back it up… then we back up and finally we backup.   That is (3) total backups, each one a seperate type, on separate media, using different software.   For example. Let’s say you currently use a remote backup program from Henry Schein or another vendor.  You keep that, it is backup job #1.  Then we add two more.   Perhaps we add a USB backup drive on the server and a network attached storage device located in a different closet.

Why THREE backups?

Backups fail, just like anything they have to be worked on from time to time.   If your backups are broke and it takes a few days to fix it- you will be at risk.  So we want two backups as a minimum to minimize the risk of a large exposure window. One backup job continues working while the other is repaired.   The third backup is the remote backup.  In my 20 years in IT I have never once had a remote backup that I put complete trust in.   I basically ignore the remote backup because I can guarantee two things about your (or anybody’s remote backup)

#1. The remote backup either does not backup EVERYTHING or

#2. The remote backup doesn’t COMPLETE in less than 24 hours.

Remote backups are good for backing up the absolute must have patient data, but they do not capture any of the other critical information on the server.  All the passwords, trusts, quickbooks data, company files and folders will typically be excluded from the remote backup job because it’s simply too much data to fit on the slow upload speeds that are available now.

How much will this cost?

The most important part is the audit and that is 100% free.  This will result in a valuable report and a custom-tailored quote to bring the backups up to OUR standards.   We try very hard to keep the costs of backups down and we have been known to give away free backup appliances and drives.  We own all our data center servers, storage appliances and we have pre-negotiated prices with backup software vendors.  This means we can profitably sell the best backups money can buy much cheaper than it would COST our competitors.  The monitoring of the backups is regular labor rates, discounted and billed in 15 minute increments.  You can decide how often we should check them and if we should fix anything or just let you know about it.   If you choose to become one of our managed clients then we will include this for free.