Company Direction Change

If there is one certainty in business, it seems to be that business is uncertain! We have had customers in property management, real estate sales, real estate development, wholesale crab meat sales / marketing, mortgage brokerage, yacht finance, real estate law, general litigation, traffic ticket and criminal defense, and hotel management.

Since the beginning, every experienced marketer and entrepreneur has said to "Find a niche". We have always wanted to stay connected to the real estate markets in one way or another. Unfortunately, in the current economy, most real estate related ventures are suffering. Fortunately, we have been guided by an unseen hand to the hotel and resort market.

Most hotels seem to be missing the benefits offered by new technology. Tape backup is still VERY common if you even see a backup in place!

We are trying very hard to get the message out there that there are better ways to make SURE that your backups are working. Diligently rotating tapes and taking them off-site does not ensure that you have a working backup. You have to periodically do a test restore. You have to think about the situations where your backup might not be so easily recovered. For example:

• What happens if your server drive(s) fail? You have to replace the drive(s), reinstall the operating system and programs, then restore the backup from the most recent tape (or tapes depending on the backup sceneraio). How long do you think this will take? Do you know that your tape backups are recoverable?
• What happens if your server is destroyed or stolen? Hopefully your backup tapes are not all in the same place that your server resided. If you DO have your backup tapes, can you get a new tape drive to read your tapes? Is your backup data compatible with your replacement server backup program? How long will it take to restore from this scenario?
• Somehow, a disgruntled employee has deleted several important files from your server as a "last hoorah". Maybe they took the backup tapes too? Your backup tapes WERE locked up securely and you did have at least one recent tape off-site, right?
• Maybe your server is really old? Maybe you are not rotating the tapes as religiously as you should? Maybe you don't rotate the tapes at all? If this is the case, I doubt you have ever attempted to run a test restore, right? Well, think about the worst case scenario... where files are lost, the server is dead, or worse yet - the server is gone altogether. Now what?

Today, disk imaging technology ensures that your backups can be restored to different hardware, that you do not have to spend hours pulling the backup from a tape to make sure it works, and that your backups can be stored on whatever media is readily available and reasonably priced. Off-site backup services ensure that your backup can be regularly saved to a secure off-site location. No more tape rotations, no more carrying a tape to a secure place to be stored, no more forgetting the tape at the office or the secured location.

You probably have a budget for your elevators, right? You pay a monthly fee for this? What about your POS system? You probably pay a monthly fee for this too, right? How about your PMS system? Of course, if any of those things were broken it would affect your hotel. Guests may complain about it. It may cost your hotel revenue. Well, what would happen if your interface PC failed? What would happen if your credit card gateway stopped working? What would happen if your sales system server failed?

You probably pay for problems on-demand now, right? You have a problem, you pay a tech company to fix the problem. This transaction is usually based on the time it takes - an hourly fee. Is your hotel's best interest and the tech company's best interest inline using this arrangement? Does your backup get taken care of using this arrangement? Is your anti-virus, anti-spam, and other security concerns taken care of routinely? Do the updates get applied to your machines for security and performance? How about disk cleanup, disk checking, and disk defragmenting?

If your elevator is important enough to be taken care of through a monthly agreement, shouldn't your interface PC also be taken care of this way? What about all of your other systems that are currently at the mercy of fate and hourly as-needed service? Are you sure that you are requesting what is needed to keep your technology working at its peak for your hotel? Wouldn't it be better if the tech company's best interest and your hotel's best interests were one in the same? Maybe it is time to consider a monthly service agreement for your technology?

We are offering this service. If you would like to learn more about this, please take a moment to contact us. We look forward to hearing from you.

Thank you for taking the time to read my rant!