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Some of us at the Symagio team made it over to Bed the other night for the Techcrunch party. Although we’ve been New Yorkers for a while now, this was our first time to the establishment. Although I’m not quite sure the idea of hanging out with my friends on a bed is something I’m into, the event (and hosts) were great.

The party was a large Web 2.0 echo chamber, where the alcohol flowed almost as quickly as new funding from VC’s desperate to find the next big thing. We walked around and talked to all the different vendors - from Alexa wannabe Compete to social stalker Me.dium. The number of Web 2.0 startups vastly outnumbered the numbers of VC’s present, but that hardly matters. The market right now couldn’t be more interesting. The recent purchase of Youtube by Google for over $1.65 billion sent shockwaves through the tech community (and the markets, for that matter). Every geek, techie, and guy with a half-baked idea became wide-eyed at the prospect of building and flipping a company for billions. Google did it. Then the Youtube guys. So the common logic goes: why not us?

Market bubbles have been going on for hundreds of years. Just ask us sometime about Tulip Mania back in the 1600s. (Tulips became extremely fashionable and therefore valuable in a short amount of time. The foolish began to invest all their money in tulip bulbs!) The real question is whether we’re facing another bubble, or if this is really the new business model of the future.

We haven’t taken a stance here at Symagio. But we do know this. What our clients want is reassurance. They want to be able to call us in the middle of the night when they have an emergency and speak to a person. And we’re there for them. That’s the way we’ve build our company. I for one wouldn’t want to try to call Google in the middle of the night after I just lost my harddrive. Good luck finding their number in the telephone book.

A big thanks to Techcrunch and all the sponsors for a great party. We’ll be sure to go back next time it comes around.

Technorati Tags: Techcrunch Party, Data Backup, Disaster Recovery, Podcast

A good friend of the Symagio team is an EMT/Paramedic/Firefighter superstar down in North Carolina, and we recently spoke to him about some interesting developments in our field of data backup. A new lawsuit filed in the healthcare industry sent ripples hundreds of miles away to small-town Emergency Medical Services departments.

A couple of weeks ago a number of individuals filed a suit against Sistsers of Saint Francis Health Services for not only exposing vital patient data, but also failing to notify these patients of the serious breach of their data. According to the article in IndyStar, the breach of data was caused by a number CDs containing vital patients records being returned to a store! Although it seems to be a careless mistake, with so much data around, these things are bound to happen unless certain elementary precautions are taken.

Over 260,000 patients records were put at risk. And with a potential penalty of $5000 per individual record - we’re talking about potential penalties in the billions. And no, we checked out arithmetic: the penalty could be over $1 billion.
What surprised us wasn’t so much the story itself, nor the enormous, bankruptcy-inducing penalties they face - we run across these stories everyday. Rather, it was that the ramifications were felt as far as away as a small-town Emergency Medical Services Department in North Carolina. We’re taking this as a good sign that people all across the country are understanding the need to tirelessly protect your data.

You can no longer say you cannot afford to securely and confidently backup your data - with such lawsuits happening more often, you simply cannot afford not to. When faced with the choices of many backup solutions today, it is certainly worth going with someone you can trust.

Technorati Tags: Data, Data Backup, Online, HIPAA, Compliance

We here at the Symagio team haven’t been blogging in a while. We certainly don’t like taking a break from our writing (it being a real creative outlet!), but we’ve been working on some exciting new systems.

First, we’re expanding our supported systems. Previously, we only backed up Windows machines. That was quite sufficient for a long time, as the vast majority of our clients use, and will continue to use, Windows. But we’ve got connections to a lot of people in the open source movement, and we’ve really felt our lack of support for Linux was something we’d like to change.

Our offsite backup solution can now run on Windows, Mac OS X, RedHat Linux, FreeBSD, and Solaris, among others. It’s essentially platform-independent, as we’ve recognized that there is invaluable data stored on virtually every computer and server, irrespective of the OS.

In addition to pushing our solution to become platform-independent, we’ve added live support for Exchange Servers, SQL & MySQL Servers and Oracle Databases. Again, this native support has been client driven, and they’re already very happy with it. We hope all of you are too.

Technorati Tags: Platform Independent, Data Backup, Mac, Online Data Backup