When something fails, how fast are you working again?
Two firms can have completely different exposure here, depending on where the work lives. If your firm runs its own server, the risk is that server. If your firm works in the cloud, backing up your documents is somebody else's job — but reaching them is still yours.
"Is the server down?"
Four words, and the whole office stops. Nobody can open a document, capture time, or pull up a matter. Every attorney, paralegal and assistant in the building is sitting still — and at a firm where everyone bills, that's thousands of dollars an hour walking out the door while you wait for someone to tell you something.
The question that matters was never whether you have a backup. It's how fast you're working again, and whether anyone has actually confirmed the backup would work.
What we do about it
Every hour your office is open, we take a complete image of your server — and then we test it. Not just confirm the job ran: we bring the backup up and verify someone could log in. If a backup is bad, we find out that hour, not on the morning you need it. At the end of each day, the last good copy goes offsite.
So when a server does fail, your firm isn't waiting on replacement hardware. We bring you up on the copy already sitting in your office — same files, same software, everyone back to work, usually within minutes of the decision to switch over. If the building itself is gone, that offsite copy means we rebuild your server in the cloud instead.
Running on the backup, performance may be slightly reduced. Most firms tell us they don't notice.
Backup problems are almost never discovered during a backup. They're discovered during a restore — at the worst possible moment, when someone learns the job had been quietly failing for weeks. We don't hope your backup works. We watched it work an hour ago.
"Is the internet down for you, too?"
Your documents, your billing, your case management — all hosted, and backing that data up is your vendor's job. Good.
None of it matters if your office can't reach it. Every internet provider goes down eventually, and eventually means during business hours. A cloud-based firm stops just as completely as a firm with a dead server: same silent office, same thousands of dollars an hour, except now there's nothing to fix and nobody to call but the carrier.
So we build your office with more than one connection and automatic failover between them. When the primary drops, the second takes over and your staff keeps working.
But two connections only help if they can't fail together. Two fiber lines running down the same road are one backhoe away from being a single connection — so where it matters, we mix the medium: fiber, cable, cellular, satellite. Different paths, different failure points.
We also handle the carrier — reporting the outage, chasing the fix — so nobody at your firm spends an afternoon on hold.
Here's the trap with redundancy: when it's working, nobody notices an outage. That's the point. But if no one is watching the backup connection, you won't know when it fails — and a firm can feel fully protected right up until the day the primary drops and nobody realized the second line had been down for a month.
We monitor every connection continuously — primary, backup, and a third where a firm needs one. Monitoring runs around the clock; we act on it during business hours.
Redundancy should be something you actually have, not something you assume.
