Let it Snow, Let it Snow, Let it Snow

I’m feeling pretty good about making the switch away from shoveling and snow-blowing the driveway at my house to hiring a plowing service. Today the truck arrived early and in minutes cleared the snow, so that a little while ago I was able to just back out onto my road.

It’s a nice place to live, but the road is narrow and winds around a stream at a good grade. The town has put up steel guard rails at spots, and cars make use of them. Two Winters back, where there are no guard rails, two cars on different days slid off the road and ended up in my front yard. In good weather for maintenance, as in snowfall, my road is not a high priority for the town: there are unpaved sections and potholes that I know well. You’ve got to take it slow if you care about your suspension. Driving slow goes double on a day like today with an added two inches of snow.

Once I’m down the hill I get to the the town reservoir. The road is better maintained and paved, but no less narrow and windy. And it’s there I met up with neighbors on their way to work, too. A plow had been there maybe half an hour ago. There was a dusting of snow on the street. My traction control engaged at least twice as my friends and I crawled our way ant-like in tight formation.

Approaching a major intersection at Main Street, the road gets wider and has shoulders. A sander must have just come through this part. Still we inched along single file, waiting for the traffic signals. I doubt I was alone in longing for the highway.

And the three-lane highway was the best driving by far. It was consistent. Visibility wasn’t perfect, but the road had been salted and plowed. So even though it was still snowing, the road was pretty clear. And it was on this stretch of highway that I came to the analogy about this snowy commute and Bryley Systems.

First Bryley has the expertise and technological investment to run your business’s network like your business is located right along the Mass Pike. Bryley has supported businesses that need this kind of computer system reliability:

• the WRTA whose bus system is a public trust
• manufacturers having to satisfy Just-In-Time defense contractors’s parts needs
• financial institutions that cannot afford downtime
• CPA firms for whom it’s critical to safeguard their clients’s data

Bryley can make it so your organization’s network continues to run in spite of a disaster or outage by providing secure server redundancies with high data availability. Traffic flow is fast and reliable. Downtime is minimal. And these qualities apply to local servers and the cloud.

Managing employees’s access to the cloud (a particular point of vulnerability) may be analogous to having your driveway plowed by a service or digging it out yourself. Each has its advantages (like speed and thoroughness versus the do-it-yourself sense of accomplishment and cost). Every situation is a compromise. There is no unlimited army of plows constantly plowing a snowy Mass Pike. You can have computer system redundancies with mirrored data in two towns, in two states or on seven continents. There is always a price and benefit equation.

The best way to decide how much you want your network to be Mass Pike-like, Main Street-like or country road-like, is to assess the value of your organization’s uptime and the cost of downtime. Kaseya’s Unitrends, one of Bryley’s back-up and data recovery tools, has an online calculator to help you figure an appropriate investment in your network: https://msp.unitrends.com/downtime-calculator/.

Bryley Systems is the sustaining and maintained infrastructure on which your business can conduct its business. For a consultation call Bryley at 978-562-6077 option 2 or email ITExperts@Bryley.com.