Business Backup
- Tourism: Hotels

On-line backup for hotels

Backupanytime have extensive experience providing online data backup for hotels. We have excellent long term references in many categories including hotels. Our experience in this area has allowed us to build a knowledge base of hotel online data backup requirements which we will share with you so you can better assess the benefits of online backup to your business.

Most hotels today use an industry front of house system such as Paragon systems, Hotsoft application to manage reservations and billing. Front of house data backup is absolutely essential for effective management and continuity. It is important that inbuilt backup as part of the end of day process simply places a backup of data on the local system or network. Your front of house system provider can not be responsible for or assist you with a restore requirement when this data has been effected by the and outage. In addition to front of house systems, most hotels will have a wide rang of additional applications and associated data which also need to be backed up. Among them are Microsoft office software and associated generated documents, online booking systems (such as CentralR) back end management systems, search engine management for Google cost per click, organic marketing, user notes, email, diary and system files. The absence of availability of just one of these facilities even on a temporary basis can result in vacant rooms and dissatisfied guests. Generally the consequences are far more serious. In addition, recent and ongoing data protection legislation has increased management responsibility in dealing with data. This, when approached correctly will assist hotel management. If not approached correctly it could result in not alone data loss but prosecution and poor publicity. The general high turnover of hotel staff does not lend itself to running manual systems where automation is possible and the general absence of full time I.T. staff in most hotels further increases the suitability of the hotel environment to online data backup.

Why is online backup ideal for Hotels?
We may repeat some of the above here but the question is posed to allow a list to be provided to interested parties.

Generally, most hotels do not retain full time I.T. staff. This leaves overburdened front of house staff with inadequate data backup training left responsible for a mission critical information technology task. This is neither secure not fail.

Hotels depend on data availability to manage virtually all selling and billing. The immediate selling and billing requirement of hotels is affected immediately on any data outage. Accounting, management and compliance are affected by medium term to permanent, partial data loss.

Hotels have a high staff turnover rate and therefore training staff to backup manually is expensive.
Again, this leaves key personnel with a busy workload given the backup task not because of any backup knowledge but because of expected career spam, or worse still an untrained short term staff member who is not committed to the organisation.

Many hotels today still use a tape system to backup data. This is generally as a consequence of the late move of hotel systems from DOS based systems to windows based systems and the retention of antiquated data backup systems. Tape systems are dangerously unreliable and complicated and have no place on a modern network.

Software and hardware vendors in the hotel trade in general do not involve themselves in the data backup management process leaving full manual procedure responsibility with the hotel to ensure data backup is complete. This is understandable as they have no facility to ensure your data is safe. On-line backup companies however can provide backup safeguards to hotel data systems.

On-line backup providers can update client contact if staff turnover affects the initial contact relationship and provide training and introduction to new staff members.

On-line backup is automated and comes with simple but comprehensive front desk and management reporting.

Most quality online backup systems are sold as a managed service so management will be contacted in person if backups are missed beyond an agreed period.

On-line backup comes with support when a data recover requirement arises This differs radically from off-line backup systems which are sold as a product, not a service.

On-line backup is encrypted, preventing unauthorised access to confidential information. This is a major advancement from manually carrying tapes or worse still retaining them at the site they are supposed to be protecting.

If you have red this document to this point, it is likely you are a hotel manager and have an interest in online data backup. Backupanytime have a successful track record providing online data backup in your industry. Contact us today to avail of our 14 day free trial and to be given client references from existing hotels using our system.

Backupanytime, for responsible people and their important data.
Further general online backup information may be found in our award winning white papers area.