ACT has been working closely with Zenith-Infotech, a world leader in offsite backup and managed services, to develop a combination of hardware, software, and services that is tailored to our clients needs. We call this product ProACTive.

ProACTive addresses two major issues, Backup and System Monitoring.

Why should you care?

Industry surveys show: 

• On Average 5 - 20% of nightly tape-based backups fail.
  

• 64% of small and medium sized businesses DO NOT backup offsite.
  

• 70% of companies that experience a backup disaster go out of business with 3 years.

The amount of detail available concerning a server’s health is incredible! Let me share some experiences from our very first install:

• Within 24 hours of the install we were notified of a pending drive failure. The drive was replaced preemptively and avoided downtime.
  

• When moving a server, a power cord was knocked loose on one of the redundant power supplies – we were notified within minutes!
  

• The CPU on a server was hitting the top end on the reporting threshold and we were notified promptly.
  

• A disk-to-disk backup filled a server drive to capacity and we were instantly notified by telephone.

Yes, these are all things that could have been found digging through event logs but who has the time? Even if you checked every server once a day an event could occur at any time.

Backup.

Tape backup systems can no longer keep up with today’s data volumes. As tape capacity increases so do tape error rates. We have found that the newer generations of tape drives are extremely prone to error driving up the cost of running and maintaining backups.

In addition, tough new regulations mandate tight control over offsite backups and dictate encryption standards. Most tape software does not encrypt data. Lost backup tapes have lead to huge headlines concerning lost confidential information. This means a loss of client trust, possible fines and expenses, and in many cases a loss of business.

ProACTive utilizes a hardware device we call a NAS (Network Attached Storage) Unit that sits on your network along with software agents on each system to be monitored. This combination can provide local backups of all your Windows based servers. In addition, the backup image can be transferred offsite in an encrypted format to two secure data centers. Access to this data remains solely in your control.

Monitoring & Managed Services.

Managed Services is the one thing everyone seems to be hyping these days. However, we have found that a lot of Managed Service Providers charge a high monthly fee for backup and may provide some limited management but not much service. Our management and monitoring is superior in many ways but our service really makes our product unique.

In addition to the backup, the software agents monitor the server’s health and report issues 24X7 to a fully staffed NOC (Network Operations Center). We are notified by email of any issues your servers may experience or by phone call for any issue that is considered of critical importance. The service also controls patch management of the OS and only installs patches that have been fully tested by our NOC.

Best of all -- we keep no secrets. If there is one thing that clients have commented on over the years it is our honesty about what we know and our willingness to share our knowledge. Many companies do not want to train their clients for fear of no longer being needed. We train any client willing to learn so we can move on to new technology more quickly. Empowered clients are happy clients.