It was a great moment when Jackson Thornton & Company, an Alabama-based accounting firm, realized that the trusting relationship it had developed with its customers could allow it to expand its business into one that could provide IT services and support in addition to accounting services.

But its success as an accounting firm created a challenge when Jackson Thornton & Company began the process of creating Jackson Thorton Technologies, a wholly owned subsidiary, and an IT solution provider: How to maintain Jackson Thornton's long-standing "accountant's reputation" for efficient service, attention to detail and professionalism? Customers would expect the same quality levels responsible for the company’s success since its inception in 1919.

To build Jackson Thornton Technologies, quality partnerships with key vendors would be paramount, says Danny Jeter, senior manager at Jackson Thornton. So within months, the upstart solution provider had partnered with best-in-class vendors and rolled out a range of IT service offerings, each intended to deliver the same quality of service that its accounting customers had grown to expect.

Solving the "Tape" Problem
Early efforts to assign and support service-level agreements (SLAs) proved to be a considerable challenge, mainly because the bulk of Jackson Thornton Technologies' clients came from its parent accounting firm, meaning a large number were in financial markets. For customers in financial verticals, network downtime and lost or corrupted data is unacceptable at best, and in worse-case scenarios is even criminal.

A greater challenge was that many of Jackson Thornton Technologies' clients were using slow and often unreliable tape backup systems for data recovery, says Jeter. A more reliable alternative for these legacy tape systems had to be offered -- particularly to financial customers -- and finding a solution appeared to be critical to Jackson Thornton Technologies' success. "We wanted to be proactive and find a solution that could get customers back up in hours, not days," says Jeter.

Jackson Thornton Technologies needed a dependable, world-class solution for customers who couldn't afford to have their systems go down if disaster struck. When Jeter saw Symantec Backup Exec System Recovery, he knew it was the answer.

"I knew it right away," he says. "Here was a way to quickly support backup and recovery in a disk-to-disk manner."

An Instantly Recognizable Solution
What Jeter found in Symantec Backup Exec System Recovery was a complete, disk-based system recovery solution for Microsoft Windows-based servers, desktops and laptops, one that allows businesses to recover from system loss or disasters in minutes, not hours or days. Dissimilar hardware platforms, virtual environments and unattended locations can all enjoy the same effective data and system backup and recovery offering.

"Using tape backup and recovery systems has always been problematic for our customers," says Jeter. "The tapes are generally unreliable and they have to be monitored daily, which is time-consuming and costly, especially for a large company with hundreds of servers. So providing an alternative and reliable backup solution saves us money, too."

Not Just for Disaster Recovery
Symantec's Backup Exec System Recovery has proven to be instrumental not just as a backup and disaster recovery solution, but also as a tool to migrate legacy systems to newer systems -- seamlessly and easily, according to Jeter. When migrating information to a new server, Symantec Backup Exec System Recovery can be used to take a complete snapshot of the existing system and simply recover (or migrate) the entire system, including configurations, settings and data, to the new server, thereby drastically reducing the time needed to complete a server migration.

This capability proved invaluable when Jeter and the Jackson Thornton Technologies team installed Symantec Backup Exec System Recovery in a processing server at a West Alabama bank. Jeter's team arrived near the close of business and used Symantec Backup Exec System Recovery to create an image of the primary application server. With a brand-new server in hand, they restored the created server image to the new server in a few hours.

"We had them up and running with no problems. We even had time to grab dinner on the way home," says Jeter. "Without Symantec, we would have had to re-install every application and then restore all of the bank's data. It would have taken at least two days. That would have been costly to the bank and to us as a service provider."

"Symantec has been our co-star," says Jeter, who has promoted and supported Symantec's Backup Exec System Recovery for several years, embedding the product into every operational delivery sold. "I would recommend Symantec to everyone. We rely on it daily for disaster recovery and file recovery. It has given both Jackson Thornton Technologies and our clients peace of mind that data is safe and readily available for recovery in the event of a disaster."