It’s hard to avoid the barrage of hype surrounding cloud-based backup solutions these days; it seems that everybody has some kind of cloud backup offering that is touted as the ultimate be all and end all. Your Practice Management Software (PMS) vendor. Your local IT support company. Heck, even your Internet Service Provider (ISP) offers such a plan.
But is such a consumer-minded cloud-based backup plan the best choice for your practice?
The answer obviously depends on why you needed a backup plan in the first place.
Perhaps the cloud backup salesperson has convinced you that a cloud backup plan is a good idea. And having your backups automatically stored somewhere in the cloud without you needing to worry about anything seemed appealing. You can always get at your backed up files through a simple web site; it’s quite easy to recover the occasional file changed or deleted by mistake.
Then maybe you heard that HIPAA compliance requires anyone maintaining electronic patient records to have a disaster recovery plan in place. This cloud-based approach surely allows you to tick that box, doesn’t it?
And finally, you might have experienced data loss at some point or another. Your server crashed, your IT guy wasn’t able to recover all the information, and you lost patient data. A recent backup would have been nice, right?
We at Practice Visual go way beyond these surface needs, and consider not only the prevention of patient data loss (mandated by HIPAA, by the way) but also how to minimize the impact of downtime to your practice as a business.
How much does it cost you, as a business owner, to not be able to see patients on a busy day –perhaps $10,000 or more? All while your IT guy scrambles to reinstall your server’s operating system from scratch, configure it, install all the applications, database engine, drivers, patches and what not, before he can even begin copying your data files from your offsite backup over your slow Internet connection. And what if the new server he built doesn’t quite match the old one, and some of your critical files weren’t really backed up because they were in use at the time the backup agent ran? All these glitches and fumbles can easily push your recovery time into the next day, sometimes even longer.
With Visual Practice, while we still give you the ability to recover the occasional deleted or inadvertently modified file, our built-in disaster recovery engine takes an exact replica snapshot of your server at the physical level, sector by sector, in image mode – and our bare metal recovery gets you back exactly where you were the night before, swiftly and extremely accurately. Even if you had thousands of patients on your server, you can usually be back up and running from such a complete data loss in 1 hour or less. All while your patients are still in your waiting room.
Contact us now at (888) 845-7621 or on the web at www.visualorthodontics.com for more information on how you can get all these benefits – and, many more – by switching to Visual Practice. You’ll be glad you did!
