Customer News, Trends and Tips

Welcome to our latest newsletter and thanks for your fantastic responses to our recent customer survey.

You have given us some excellent information on what you want to see from
Plan-b going forward. Congratulations also to Bradley Byrne from Fisher & Paykel Healthcare who won the iPad 2 in our survey prize draw. 

Many of you asked for more information about other customer experiences, industry trends, and useful tips. We will continue to refine our newsletter, but we hope we’ve ticked most of the boxes for you in this issue.

Please also join us in welcoming Greg Flanagan to our senior management team. Greg joins us in a new role as our Chief Technical Officer and he brings a wealth of experience to the team. Most recently he spent four years at Axon where he was the technical lead for one of their biggest accounts.

Kind Regards
Ian Forrester
Managing Director

Bradley Byrne from Fisher & Paykel Healthcare receiving his new iPad 2 from Plan-b’s John Watson.

Recent Customer Activity

In the last three months, 58 customers activated their Plan-b to recover servers. We successfully recovered 351 servers and over 38TB of data.

We also provided more than 200 people from eight companies a place to work in Christchurch after February's earthquake. This was quite an achievement considering we started the week with only 70 seats available in Christchurch, and had to move to secure and set up a whole new location to accommodate everyone.

See more about what some of our customers learned from their activations below, and in future Plan-b updates.

Lack of Disaster Preparedness

A number of companies here and overseas have recently completed business continuity research to identify how prepared businesses are should a disaster strike.

The results were frightening! On average, around half of the companies reported little or no disaster planning, and of those that had a plan, a large portion had never tested that their plan would actually work... Of those that did test, almost three-quarters found issues that would have been a problem in a real crisis.

As a Plan-b customer you clearly have a competitive advantage over those that have not made arrangements to protect their business data. However, have you checked whether your customers and suppliers have a tested plan in place too?

It’s worth investigating don’t you think? It would be nice to know that when you recover you still have suppliers to buy from and customers to sell to.

Product & Service Updates

New SafeNOW Backup Tape Web Portal

We are in the process of finalising access to our new backup tape management website which will allow online management of your backup tapes.

Full information on the new service will be sent to all SafeNOW customers shortly. In the meantime, if you need any assistance please contact us by phone on
09 916 6054 or 0800 4 TAPES or by email at one of the following addresses:

Auckland:           akltapes@plan-b.co.nz
Wellington:        wtgtapes@plan-b.co.nz
Christchurch:    chctapes@plan-b.co.nz

Update to BackupNOW Service

Our BackupNOW customers are currently being transitioned to an upgraded service which will allow us to support more operating systems and applications, plus add new features in the future. If you would like to know more about our online services, please contact us on 09 916 6054 or sales@plan-b.co.nz

Recent Events

Plan-b presented at this week’s Conferenz Cloud Services & Security Summit in Auckland. The number of questions asked at the end of the presentation indicated a very high level of interest from attendees in making sure they have the right business continuity plan in place. 

We have also been supporting a number of smaller events where disaster planning and recovery have been high on the agenda.

Events Calendar

We will be participating in next month’s CIO Summit in Auckland as one of the exhibition partners. Please come and see us if you are attending and enter our on-stand prize draw! More information is available on the Conferenz website here.

Please also look out for us if you are attending the Business Continuity Management and Disaster Recovery Conference in Wellington on 22-23 August. More information is available here.

2011 Westpac Auckland North Business Awards 

We are very pleased to be entering this year’s Auckland North Business Awards. Hopefully we will have some good news as the process unfolds. Watch this space!

Tech Tip

Up-to-date Workstation Images

A key element to most effectively “failover” to the Plan-b environment is to have an up-to-date workstation (or desktop) image.

The workstation image presents all necessary applications your users require day to day to perform their role, so it is imperative that the image mirrors what they currently use.

The most likely outcome of not having up to date workstation images is further downtime impacting your ability to service your customers.

Please talk to your Plan-b Account Manager if you would like to discuss your workstation image.