Mengali Accountancy relies on cloud-based disaster recovery services

Mengali Accountancy is leveraging iland’s Disaster-Recovery-as-a-Service (DRaaS) offering to minimise downtime and also backup clients’ mission-critical data. The accounting firm’s successful implementation demonstrates how iland’s proven disaster recovery solutions empower small and medium businesses with rapid recovery capabilities that have traditionally required massive IT footprints.

With offices in San Francisco and Healdsburg, California, Mengali Accountancy executes back office accounting needs for more than two hundred clients. In 2007, the company went paperless, which amplified the high value of sensitive digital information it collected, processed and stored to efficiently serve clients and address compliance requirements. The convenience of transferring and searching electronically was matched by the difficulty of keeping client financial data secure.

Mengali Accountancy sought a disaster recovery plan to replace its processes that were susceptible to human error, attack and natural disasters. At the time, its onsite backup consisted of drives that were changed out nightly and taken home weekly by key staff members. Offsite backup was executed with a facility at the firm’s ISP, located only about ten miles away.

“I had a client whose employee was in the process of porting home one of those infamous portable backup drives, and her car was burglarised,” said Renee Mengali, CPA and president of Mengali Accountancy. “It was really a huge eye-opener for me to think about this critical data that's living on a device, leaving the office and going home with people. That was simply not the secure environment I wanted for sensitive client information. Beyond that, when Hurricane Sandy hit, it became appallingly clear to me that when there's an earthquake, a flood, or a natural disaster of any sort, chances are that our local ISP is going to be affected as well as us.”

After consulting with the firm’s local IT providers and investigating several vendors, Mengali Accountancy found iland to be the only provider with a solution to meet its technical and procedural requirements. Leveraging iland’s DRaaS, the firm now has secure data replication in geographically diverse locations outside California and can restore both data and business services within its Recovery Time Objective (RTO) of four hours. The solution can also easily be scaled as Mengali Accountancy continues to grow.

“iland worked with us to ensure our recovery technology and processes would work smoothly and everyone easily understands what needs to happen in case of a disaster,” said Mengali. “Now our iland solution is part of our service offering with new clients. I tell them that we have a suite of specific offerings in this space that no other CPA firm our size can touch. I can say, ‘Yes we handle your back office accounting, allow for internal controls and audits, and handle your offsite backup and data recovery because we have a solution in place for that.’ We can position ourselves as a financial services solution provider that has addressed every concern that keeps business owners up at night.”

“All too often, we see companies taking immeasurable risk by using outdated disaster recovery processes or settling for basic backup instead of true disaster recovery,” said Lilac Schoenbeck, vice president of product management and marketing at iland. “Mengali Accountancy exemplifies how companies of all sizes can cost-efficiently ensure business continuity in the face of accidental, malicious and environmental threats, and iland is proud to help them get the job done.”