How Advertising Standards Authority manages to keep their data in one piece
Tue 20 Jan 2015
The business world of today operates thanks to data. We work in companies that process thousands of pieces of information daily even when completing the most trivial tasks, such as buying office supplies.
We need to check our data base for the supplier, check the budget, the usual order size and update the data base with a new order.
No one questions that having data saves and earns money for your business, which makes your data your most important business asset.
Following this thought, it is only reasonable to make sure that the data you collect and buy is safe and sound and ever-available to you and your staff.
Processing your clients’ suggestions
What your business audience says about your business and your products is very often crucial to your success. You try to store all this information securely and make sure you use it in contact with each of the individuals. After years you can analyse the data to have a fully personalized picture of every client and prospect to approach them with the right message and offering.
But that’s if you still have all the data and have managed to store it was collected in the first place.
The business of one of our clients revolves around dealing with complaints and suggestions, the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA), who processes and deals with complaints issued towards all media in the UK. As you can imagine, the data flow is often quite random and chaotic in nature.
Since data is vital to the way that ASA works there was a need to ensure it is kept organised and stays like that. They deal with facts not a distorted image of reality.
Disaster Recovery – sounds scary
ASA required a good Disaster Recovery service from us to ensure that the facts remain facts. Were they afraid of a flood, fire or an earthquake? Hardly….
Disaster in the name of the service is very metaphorical, it can mean the truly catastrophic, but it can also simply cover power outage, administrative error or the 5 o’clock syndrome that keeps us from hitting Ctrl+S on our keyboard by the end of the day.
When every detail matters in completing a project, you need to make sure every detail is saved and can then be recovered easily in case it simply disappears.
To DIY or not to DIY?
That is the question… Once again, if by any chance your profit is based on how well you analyse information about your prospects, accounts and products you have to think carefully about the capabilities of your IT department.
ASA decided to outsource this to Techgate for reasons based more cost-effectiveness and security. The solution implemented by us was awarded a EuroCloud Award 2014 for Best Business Impact use of the Cloud.
The truth is, every business is different, but we need our data safe and accessible. To see how to achieve this, I invite you to read full story behind the ASA project and talk to us and find out how Techgate can help you.
