Dear Clients and Friends,

Summer is almost here. I think my favorite part of summer is the longer days. It sure is nice to have a few hours of daylight after work. Going home after dark during the winter is not much fun.
Along with longer daylight hours, summer brings high heat. While warm sunny days are nice for trips to the lake or the beach, they can be damaging to your computer systems. Always make sure that your computers are operating in a cool environment. Servers are especially sensitive to excessive heat. Often, we find that some office complexes will either raise the temperature in their buildings on the weekend or turn off the air all together. This causes thermal stress to your servers and any workstations that might be left on. Check with your building manager to see if your air conditioning is running over the weekend. If it is not, you might want to see if arrangements can be made to keep at least a minimal amount of cooling in your office to prevent any damage.

Another thing that summer brings is thunderstorms. Now is a good time to make sure that all of your computers are protected with battery backup units or at least surge protection strips. Power surges can be very damaging to computers and other electronic equipment.

While taking precautions to prevent damage is a good thing, it is not always fool proof. Sometimes the best laid plans will fail. That is why you need to make sure you are getting a daily, off-site backup of your critical data. There are multiple options available for data backup, depending on how much data you need to backup and how quickly you need to retrieve your data in the event of a system failure.

If you would like to schedule a time to discuss surge protection, data backup or any other computer issues that you might be concerned with, please call our office at 205-980-9903. As always, please feel free to give us a call with any IT questions that you might have. We are here to serve you. Until next month….

John Browning
Cahaba Valley Computer Services, LLC