With 25 offices throughout Virginia, West Virginia and Tennessee, Pro-Tax s committed to setting the standard for quality, service, efficiency and profitability by which all seasonal tax firms throughout the United States will measure themselves. Pro-Tax attributes its steady growth since 1973 to this customer pledge. Each Pro-Tax office maintains 2-6GB of critical data in a Windows operating environment with Broadband connection.

The Challenge
The challenge for Pro-Tax was to remain at the leading edge of technology to ensure that tax filing records are secured offsite in an encrypted format that protects the privacy of the customer yet ensures ready availability and access in the event of a server failure, local disaster, file corruption or data loss. This is critical year-round but more so during tax season when missed deadlines can result in increased fines and penalties. Tape backup was proving unreliable and costly.

Prior to using Asigra Televaulting from backup service provider, Storage Guardian, for vaulting their critical data from all 25 offices,  Pro-Tax backed up each office to tape. This legacy tape method created challenges. “We found that some backups failed to run when scheduled, or failed during the backup process. The worst cases were when the backup ran and posted as successful, but no data was on the tape at all!” said Milo Farineau, Director of Information Technology, at Pro-Tax.

The company wanted a guarantee that their clients’ data would be restorable 100% of the time in case of an emergency with minimal effort and time lapse. As part of their commitment to their customers, only a demonstration of Asigra Televaulting functionality would prove beyond a doubt that this solution was what was needed to meet their high standards.

To test a disaster scenario, Pro-Tax conducted a bare metal restore (BMR) test. It simulated a damaged Windows 2000 Server responsible for managing the backup/restore process at one of the company’s remote offices. With a single phone call to Storage Guardian to ensure security protocols, they were able to then restore the requested full backup from the backup service provider’s vault to a new server. The company also needed to ensure adherence to compliance regulations without creating a drain on limited and valuable IT resources.