Backing up your business files is an important part of your IT strategy. We never get tired of pointing this out. Why? Because 60% of businesses that lose their data in a disaster won’t recover: they will shut down within 6 months following the loss.

Make no mistake: your data is at the heart of your business. You need to safeguard it.

But you may not know what features you need to look for when searching for an online backup solution. What are your “must-haves”? That’s where we come in!

In today’s blog post, we’re going to take a close look at the backup features that you can’t do without in your backup solution so that you can make the right decision when you weigh up which service for backing up your critical data best suits your business.

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May is here, ladies and gentlemen, and for cine-geeks, that means the Cannes Film Festival is upon us.

Discoveries are about to be made and cinematic gems are on the verge of becoming trend setters. With such an event about to unfold, we, here at SherWeb, feel this is the perfect time to release the second part of our list of Hollywood fortune-tellers’ work (read the first part here).

Bon cinéma!

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Still think Microsoft Outlook is just for email? You’re missing the much bigger time-saving picture.

Over the years, Outlook has steadily evolved from a basic email application into a powerful productivity platform. Office 2013 Outlook has some pretty impressive time management tools that go well beyond better functionality on touchscreen and mobile devices. Outlook 2013 has also become a fantastic software for managing multiple tasks and improving your overall time management.

And if you’re already comfortable using Outlook’s basic features, incorporating Outlook’s productivity tools and time-saving shortcuts into your daily use should be relatively easy.

Here are 10 easy ways to save time with Outlook 2013:

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Wondering if you should upgrade to SharePoint 2013? Join the crowd. A fair bit has already been written about the many improved features and capabilities of this much-anticipated release.

If you’ve missed them, our new SharePoint hosting 2013 site offers a great overview.

But with these improvements also comes the single most common question that accompanies any new release: Is it worth upgrading, and if so, when?

If you’ve just recently upgraded to SharePoint 2010, are the improvements in 2013 good enough to warrant back-to-back upgrades? And if you’re still running SharePoint 2007, is 2013 worth making the intermediate upgrade to SharePoint 2010 now?

We’ve been getting these questions a lot lately. Not only from our existing Hosted SharePoint 2007 and 2010 customers, but from many IT pros contemplating shifting more of their organization’s IT needs to the cloud as part of their overall strategy.

We recently sat down with Philippe Pepin, one of our in-house SharePoint admins to get his take. Here’s what he had to say.

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Suffering from email archive stress syndrome? You’re not alone.

Managing an email system can be difficult and frustrating at the best of times. Having to worry about email archiving on top of server maintenance and storage allocation can take any sane person over the edge. With growing government regulations and standards, more and more companies are being required to retain and protect the data contained in email messages for a certain period of time.

A growing number of companies are also implementing their own email archiving policies for productivity and legal issues, or as a cost-effective solution to data storage issues.

There’s no getting around archiving these days. And to make matters worse, the wrong approach can get you into real trouble.

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Is cloud computing the single greatest threat to your IT career? If the thought has crossed your mind, you’re not alone. Some in IT fear the cloud; others worry that it could be a threat to data security. But more and more organizations are realizing that it’s the smart way to go.

And that means there’s a good chance you’ll soon be faced with the next step in your IT strategy: Taking your service-as-a-software solution to the cloud.

Does that mean it’s time to rethink your career?

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As much as 75 percent of a company’s intellectual property is contained within email and messaging systems, according to Osterman research. And that makes email more than just a vital business communications tool; it constitutes an electronic substitute of legal business documentation. In other words, that message from Phil in accounting could one day be used as legal evidence.

More and more businesses are required to archive email in order to comply with legislation like the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, which was enacted to enforce corporate governance standards and ethical conduct. Other businesses have turned to archiving as a cost-effective long-term solution to the security and storage issues caused by growing volumes of email.

What’s that you say? You don’t archive Exchange? Still not archiving Outlook? These four arguments might change your mind.

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The future is here. 2013 is the new 2012 and although it seems like we’re still in December, that month is long gone. Predictions made back then are therefore a part of our reality.

The same goes for some of the assumptions made once upon a time by strange artists. Indeed, technology’s staggering evolution has turned Science Fiction into the science that’s paving the way for 2013. What we once called the future is now our every-day life.

We know it: blogging about futuristic movies has been done. But what very few people have undertaken is identifying which films predicted the world we live in right now. So that’s what we decided to do.

We drafted a list of motion pictures that forecasted elements of our daily lives in 2013 and then gave the list a nice trimming in order to isolate the most popular topics today.

Here’s the first part of our list.

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Everybody owns a smartphone or a tablet these days. But what do we do with our mobile devices? Talk and text, of course… and play Angry Birds, watch adorable kitten videos on YouTube and update our Facebook status so that all our friends know we’re drinking a hazelnut macchiato at Starbucks.

How did we survive the 90’s without all this?

But there’s more you can do with your Blackberry or iPad. Countless new apps are developed every month, and some of them can be of great help.

In earlier blogs, we discussed how Exchange, Lync and SharePoint can help you be more productive in your work.

For this article, we asked members of the SherWeb team about their favorite apps for making day-to-day activities easier, saving time and improving overall productivity.

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March Madness starts today. Three weeks of hard-fought, breathtaking basketball matches. We know that the March Madness has an impressive history of glorious moments. We are all looking forward for the next classic game. Remember 1985’s Villanova against Georgetown upset? The epic battle between Indiana and Syracuse in 1987? And the classic of all classics: Kentucky and Duke going at each other on March 28, 1992. Games dubbed classics, but also brilliant, nerve-wrecking contests.

Here is another classic in the making, this time in the data backup field: In-House solutions versus Cloud solutions. In-House solutions get fairly good press, but the Cloud has some key players in its lineup: security, reliability and flexibility. Will online backup run the score or will the In-House solution shut down its opponent?

Without further ado, we present you the Backup Madness infographic:

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