Stronghold Data protects business information

Or will it?

“We hear a lot of horror stories,” said J.A. Richards, co-owner of Stronghold Data. “Our job is to help those folks and other businesses have a secure backup plan.”

Data loss causes

According to the company, the major causes of data loss as hardware or system malfunction, human error, software corruption, computer viruses, natural disaster and employee sabotage.

“Employee sabotage is the most common cause,” Stronghold operations director Al Johnson said. “It could be that employee you have just fired or someone upset about a company decision that affects them but they purposely delete files or damage them in some way as an act of revenge.”

Next on the list of loss causes is hardware or system malfunctions.

“A Tulsa dentist had a 30 day trial with us and his 30 days ended on a Friday,” Johnson said. “He hadn’t renewed the service and the trial offer put him in a suspended state. He had a glitch in his system over the weekend and lost everything. Patient files, X-rays, billing records were all gone. We were able to restore it all to him within 15 minutes.”

Johnson and Richards receive similar calls on a daily basis.

Backup procedures

“Unfortunately, businesses believe that everything is fine when they do their own backup procedures at their office,” Richards said. “Then something happens and they go to their backup files and find that there is nothing there; the procedure failed. Or they have magnetic tapes and they go to those and find that only part of the data has actually been recorded. Tapes are the worse.”

Richards said that industry statistics found that half of the companies that lose their data after a system failure due to natural or hardware causes are never able to open again.

“That’s why we want customers to give our system a try,” Johnson said. “I ask them to pick just one or two files they know they would be lost without and use our services for just thirty days to see how we work.”

Once the trial period is over, customers sign on for service paying a monthly charge that starts at $29.95 and increases according to the size of the files to be stored.

“I enjoy this work because you are proactively helping people,” Johnson said. “There’s a lot of emotion in the data recovery field and we know the trust our customers are putting in us to keep their records safe.”

Billy Parker, senior vice president of computer information systems operations for Abbey Title, has been one of those customers for three years.

“We have every record from the Jasper County recorder’s office going back 65 years,” Parker said. “It’s in one big file and we can’t let anything happen to it or we’d be lost. Stronghold has given me secure back up.

“I recommend them to all the vendors we work with. They’ve been great for us.”

Data safety

Stronghold Data customers include small businesses, associations, healthcare providers, insurance companies, financial institutions and government defense contractors.

“We have two underground storage locations in Carthage,” Richards said. “The customer’s system sends data backups through to our group of servers at scheduled intervals. The data is encrypted when it leaves their office. We don’t even know the codes or passwords or anything, file names are all scrambled so you can’t even recognize the folder structures.”

Customers receive daily e-mail reports on their backup status and Stronghold can keep a history of all deleted and changed files for one day to twenty years or more.

“Our facilities are protected by layers of security,” Richards said. “That includes guards, video surveillance, a number of backup power sources and other protective measures. It’s insurance for your data.”

Richards, a self-proclaimed “computer geek,” became interested in computers seventeen years ago.

“I have grown with the industry,” he said. “I learned about networks as they developed. I’ve jumped in here with both feet and the business is growing.”

He declined to disclose company revenues.