Imagine this: a large quote for services has just been submitted to a prospective client through your company’s Pittsburgh office, and the buzz is all over from headquarters on down that this job could greatly boost profits for the year. But rather suddenly that buzz turns to panic when the purchasing agent from the Pittsburgh prospect calls in and says another vendor has submitted a competing–and lower-priced–quote for the same services. Now your company must react in real time if they are to save the job; a series of meetings or a mass of red tape delaying a response will kill the sale. In today’s economic “tooth-and-claw” business climate, only the quick survive.
A company can only react nimbly to a situation is if their internal infrastructure is fully prepared to spring to action when necessary. Because automation plays such a major role in that infrastructure, computer services must also be able to react in real time. Applications and performance must all be finely tuned, and IT must always be ready to respond.
A system must be as error-proof as possible, too. Going back to our initial scenario: what if the sales rep that proposed the original deal finds that she accidentally deleted the original quote, the one that must now be rapidly revised? Because it was saved across a network to a server (as most files are in corporations today), it cannot be retrieved through the Windows Recycle Bin, as this method only works with files saved on the local drive. IT personnel dive in to retrieve the file from backup–but the file was substantially modified since the last backup occurred. Calling the prospect to retrieve a copy would be out of the question as it would make the company look inefficient, so the sales rep will have to burn the midnight oil to bring the quote back into the state it was in when submitted to the prospect, and since she’s relying on her memory, she hopes she gets it right. After that, the quote must be modified to reflect the adjusted pricing. Let’s hope the prospect doesn’t take the delay as a sign of negative response and decide to go with the competitor.
To keep that responsive edge, your company would do well to implement a real-time data protection solution. Such a solution replaces the Windows Recycle Bin with one if its own, allowing for recovery of any accidentally deleted file whether saved locally or remotely on a server. Hours of employee time–as well as hours of IT time–are saved. Files can be recovered instantly with the click of a mouse.
With real-time protection and real-time recovery in place, we could go back to our original scenario once again. But there’s not much to say; the revised quote was sent to the prospect days ago and the deal was already closed, snatched right out of the jaws of that threatening competitor.
