Proactive Network Services
Two New Services From PolarStar

By Bret Jones, PolarStar Practice Manager

We’ve heard you! The PolarStar team has stepped up to meet a request from our clients -  to offer services that large corporations enjoy, but at a price that is reasonable for small and medium-sized businesses.  We are now offering two new services that before only the Fortune 1000 could afford.  The first is a revolutionary backup and disaster recovery service that may signal the end of tape backups. The second is an intrusion protection and firewall service which provides enterprise quality protection from external attacks.

We are calling our new backup solution PolarStar Backup and Disaster Recovery Service.  This is a disk-to-disk backup solution that offers far more functionality than backing up to tape, at about the same cost.  Some of the advantages are listed below.

• A complete solution that is designed to reduce any server down time with the use of a specialized backup and virtual server appliance
• Allows near real-time backups - as frequently as every 15 minutes
• Offers offsite storage at an affordable cost
• Provides a low cost, speedy disaster recovery process
• Data is encrypted so it is not accessible to anyone, either on the NAS or at the remote storage facility without the passkey.
• Eliminates the cost and time of managing on-site tape backup - We monitor and manage the entire process.
• All costs, including the costs of frequent on site backups, on site virtual server, remote storage, disaster recovery in the event of disaster and 24x7 management of the entire process, are bundled at a price that is comparable to the overall cost of buying and managing tape backup.

Our new Managed Intrusion Prevention and Firewall Service provides a level of protection against external attacks that has not previously been available to small and medium-sized organizations.  While there are Intrusion Prevention products out there, the real cost is in the need to hire in-house, full-time security experts to manage your network in addition to the ongoing hardware and software investments. Our service provides those security experts on a 24/7, 365 days a year basis along with all the hardware and software required to keep you protected.

In their own way, each service offers high levels of protection previously unavailable to most organizations.  We are truly excited to be able to bring these services to those who really need them - the small and medium-sized businesses.

Bret Jones is the PolarStar Practice Manager, responsible for the daily management and development of PolarStar services. Bret has been with Polar Systems since 1998. He is a skilled Network Engineer and holds a degree in Psychology from Linfield College.