Losing your Invisible Concierge – Why Backups are so Important?

In today’s fast paced “I need it now” world, technology has become vital to any organization’s success. It is the backbone that keeps the hotel or restaurant operating seamlessly and plays an essential role in customer satisfaction.   

Even before a guest enters your hotel or restaurant, technology is supporting your website, promoting your business or allowing your guests to create a reservation over the internet or phone. Technology is checking the guest in, creating their room keys and authorizing their credit card. It’s giving guests the ability to order room service, movies and internet services. Technology places a guests order at the restaurant and ensures the chef knows what he needs to cook and when. Technology charges the bill to their room or allows immediate payment by credit card. Technology reminds you when to order more Gordons Gin, or Coffee.

Employees also use the same technology to check room availability, look up or create reservations, view profiles, print folios or set wake up calls. Technology allows staff to email confirmation letters and know the name of the in-house guest that is calling to ask a question.

Technology is the invisible concierge that makes everything run effortlessly and silently contributes greatly to overall guest experience.

A disruption of key primary or support operations can cause a crisis for any business and severely impact the guest experience. It need not be a catastrophic failure like those caused by a fire or hard drive failure; it could be an outage to a single circuit that carries guest information. All computer data is at risk from threat or damage. Even with the most reliable equipment and the most secure operating environment, there is always the possibility of something going wrong.

The charts below illustrates that these disasters come from many different avenues.

 Critical or catastrophic failures, no matter the cause, need to be repaired as soon as possible. Without any form of backup copy of your data all information is lost. The only way to proceed is to start fresh and no one wants to do that.

 It is vital that data be fully backed up on a daily basis to minimize data loss and enable restoration of information, allowing normal operating procedures to resume as quickly as possible.

Here are some tips that should be done as a minimum:

1. Maintain the support agreement with your backup solution vendor. In a crisis, you do not want to hear that you don’t have a support agreement.
2. Ensure that the backup is configured correctly and contains all the files and folders necessary for restoration.
3. Confirm that all agents (remote,Oracle or SQL) are configured and connecting successfully.
4. Create a process that included the IT, Night Audit or Front Office Manager confirming that the backup completed successfully.
5. Enable any email functions that the backup software supports to send an email on completion of the backups as a second confirmation.
6. If the system is backing up to tape, rotate tapes daily. This can be done any time before or after the backup starts.
7. Replace tapes every 8-10 months.
8. Disk and alternate backup solutions should also be monitored for space or hardware issues.

Don’t be caught without a backup. Data loss can be very costly, particularly for hotels and restaurants in the small and medium business (SMB) market where the difference between survival and closure can rest on the ability to recover from a disaster.

Don’t forget if you are unsure, have questions or concerns regarding the back up of your data – reach out to your MICROS account manager we are always happy to help.

Find out more about what MICROS can do for you! For more information contact us at info@micros.com Phone: 866.287.4736 (US and Canada)