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Challenges of Managing Real Estate Data

Accessibility and reliability of information is paramount to success in the real estate industry. Without a variety of high-availability applications, professionals are hard pressed to make informed, business-critical decisions. In 2005, Hurricane Katrina destroyed thousands of residential and commercial properties in southern U.S. states. Without access to information systems, many companies without disaster recovery plans in place closed their doors within months.

Large real estate organizations easily find themselves swamped with hard copy paper records, and managing this information can become very risky. In the event of a fire, flood or other natural disaster, such documents can easily be destroyed so many offices have adopted the practice of scanning real estate documents to PDF. However, the same natural disasters which threaten hard copy documents also can destroy physical hard drives and computer systems which contain your scanned documents. For this reason, a backup strategy is required to ensure business continuity and access to documents in the event of a disaster.

Tape backup has traditionally provided the means by which real estate organizations protect scanned documents and other electronic data, but with all the paperwork involved in real estate, usage quickly outgrows storage capacity and tape backup becomes grossly inefficient. For protecting large volumes of critical data, tape is simply too problematic:

• Tape is unreliable, with failure rates as high as 20% to 50% for data recoveries
• Backup tapes remain vulnerable to physical damage or theft
• Tape backup is slow, labor-intensive and results in large backup windows, costing your company staff productivity and profitability from the administrative overhead entailed

Complete Data Protection for Real Estate Organizations

CRC’s online backup offers real estate companies solid peace of mind to protect business operations, as well as many immediate advantages over tape backup. First and foremost, our Enterprise Data Backup & Recovery securely transfers data offsite to a fully redundant, disaster-hardened data storage facility, ensuring the integrity of your information.

CRC’s online backup works differently from other backup and restore processes. It doesn’t require that you install and run software on each and every machine. Instead, an authorized administrator-user can protect an unlimited amount of servers, databases, desktops and laptops from a single point using agentless backup technology. It eliminates the grossly inefficient process of backing systems up to individual tapes and having them shipped offsite via truck to a tape library, and frees up valuable human and network resources to improve your firm’s productivity.

Some of the technical features of CRC’s online backup service include:

• Redundancy: Two (2) Secured, Redundant Data Centers
• High Availability: N+1 Hardware Grid for Backup Performance
• Continuity: Continuous Data Protection for More Current Recoveries
• Fast Backups: WAN-Optimized Architecture for Reduced Backup Windows
• No Interruptions: Hot Database Backup for Protection of Online Systems

Secure Long-Term Archival of Real Estate Documents

CRC DataProtection addresses challenges of managing archival or inactive real estate data and documents with features optimized to both manage archives efficiently and affordably while also meeting regulatory compliance standards for accessibility of information:

• Record Alteration or Destruction – CRC’s long-term archival process creates digital certificates for destruction of data, creating a clear audit trail for any manipulation of data
• Retention of Complaints – CRC DataProtection provides for the long-term retention of all legal documents – leases, deeds and more - in file servers or databases
• Production of Records – Electronic financial records are kept current, are backed up, and are available for retrieval or restore at the touch of a button
• Message-Level Restore – CRC DataProtection provides fine degrees of specificity in data recovery, to the level of a single email message

By virtue of the fact that it is designed for maximum usability and audit control, real estate organizations large and small gain credibility and peace of mind simply by utilizing CRC’s SOX-compliant Enterprise backup & recovery solution.

Reduce Data Backup Costs While Gaining Enhanced Levels of Protection

Real estate organizations simply get better protection of data with CRC’s online backup than with tape. Critical customer data is always safe, and always available, and with remote management of data backup processes, you save administrative overhead while reducing disaster risk significantly.

If you are a realtor or a property manager and want to implement a more reliable disaster recovery strategy while reducing costs, contact us today. Evaluate our service, and we’ll show you just how easy it is to guarantee that your most valuable business asset - information - is always available, no matter what.