Advanced 365 partners with Plan B to offer SMEs super-fast disaster recovery service

Advanced 365 (Advanced) announces an official partnership agreement with specialist IT disaster recovery provider, Plan B. The partnership will enable Advanced to offer SMEs disaster recovery of their IT servers in less than one hour, the fastest recovery time available from any cloud service provider world-wide.

Disaster recovery technology is becoming increasingly essential for businesses, due to flood, fire and terrorism risks. Downtime is costing UK businesses £2 billion each year in lost revenue and according to the Federation of Small Businesses (FSB), 80% of businesses that lose data from a disaster close within 18 months and 90% close within two years .

Plan B specialises in protecting IT servers and enables businesses to fully recover all servers in approximately 15 to 45 minutes, meaning employees can be up and running quickly, in the event of an emergency. It is the only disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS) provider that can offer a pre-recovery service, where IT systems are fully recovered and tested in advance which is the only way to guarantee 100% success of a full recovery.

The pre-recovery process is also automated, reducing the risk of error and making the service much more cost effective and easy to use.Advanced will offer the solution both to its on-premise and cloud based customers. The partnership will be a benefit for customers, particularly in the SME space, that need strong business continuity plans but may not be able to afford more expensive disaster recovery options.

Andy Brown, Managing Director, Advanced 365 (SME Division) says: “Our partnership with Plan B will enhance Advanced 365’s cloud-based portfolio so that we can now offer our customers a fast, automated and affordable disaster recovery service.

“95% of companies in the UK experienced a data outage in the past year. Whilst many organisations see disaster recovery solutions as a luxury, they are starting to realise that investing in a quality disaster recovery service acts as an insurance against the loss of IT systems and services. In some cases this can mean the difference between sink or swim.”

Tim Dunger, CEO, Plan B, says: “The cost of IT downtime can make or break a business with downtime for the average business costing as much as £1.5 million per annum. This is one of the reasons we are seeing such a demand for our unique pre-recovery service.

“Working with Advanced 365 will give us a great opportunity to align with a trusted brand and raise awareness of the importance of the pre-recovery option, which ultimately gives businesses peace of mind."

The average midsized company has 16-20 hours of network, system or application downtime per year. Customers looking to justify the cost of business continuity will have access to the Plan B calculator to figure out how much downtime will cost them per outage or per annum.