Using database synchronisation protects you from lost business

Using database synchronisation protects you from lost business in the event of a server failure

 

How do you ensure that a system failure doesn’t bring your business to a halt? What would the impact be to your business if you lose your business systems? How much, time and therefore revenue is lost when staff cannot work?  According to Datto, a small to medium business can lose £130 per minute when systems are down typically resulting in a loss of £8,000 in revenue.

According to IT Pro approximately 36% of system failures are due to server hardware failure and often this is the thing that takes the longest to fix.

Following several surveys carried out by organisations such as IT Pro and Security Magazine, it seems that only 51% of organisations have any form of IT disaster recovery plan in place so what do they do in the event of a failure? Not having a plan can turn the delay in restoring the system into days, can your business survive that?

FileMaker provides the ability to take daily backups so should the server go down, once the server is restored, (which can take hours or days depending on the replacement’s availability), the system can be restored using yesterday’s data. Of course, this means that a day’s data is lost. What would the impact be on your business if this happened?

A safer and more secure option would be to utilise data synchronisation technology to ensure that you always have a near real time copy of the data ready and available on a secondary server ensuring any server failure can minimise the data loss to as little as minutes.

Compass Data use Mirrorsync to achieve this.

MirrorSync enables the synchronisation of multiple FileMaker servers (as well as SQL to SQL Servers and FileMaker Server to SQL Server) for not only Disaster recovery but also for load balancing, clustering or to speed up slow connection to your Database Server for a distributed workforce.

Using MirrorSync to cluster FileMaker servers running side-by-side can increase server availability for your mission critical solution. Through data replication, you can ensure server reliability by balancing loads and handling server failure.

Compass Data has used MirrorSync for Database synchronisation  in several client solutions to connect active servers with backup servers ensuring constant updates to the backup with real time data so that the two are as closely matched as possible. This approach means that in the event of a server failure the users can automatically connect to the backup server and  carry on with their workloads with minimal interruption and with minimal loss of data, (minutes not hours).

The system is configured so that when the server fails, all the users need do is to log in again in the usual manner and they will automatically be transferred to the backup server. When the active server has been restored, MirrorSync will upload the  current version of the data to the active server, effectively the backup solution working in reverse. At the appropriate time, the users can be redirected to the active server.

This approach not only protects your business from lost revenue, it also protects your reputation and customer satisfaction. There is nothing more harmful to a company’s reputation than the inability to respond to a customers need, whether it’s placing an order or processing a service request.

 

Would you like to find out more about MirrorSync and how it can help your business?