Soft Solutions’ Paul Leslie has identified a major back-up issue that most SMEs don’t have a solution for. After developing a solution the company is making the jump from distributor to vendor.Soft Solutions have been distributing Storagecraft’s ShadowProtect for the past four years, and during this time Leslie says he has witnessed a “change in the paradigm” in the back-up mentality. But while most businesses have a back-up solution focused around on-site disaster and off-site recovery, Leslie says many don’t have a cost effective option for smaller scale hardware failures. This is the hole in the market Leslie aims to fill with the recent release of the Business Continuity Appliance.“Businesses have an option for disaster recovery, which to me is something like a tsunami or a fire, but what about simple hardware failures?”Given the reliance on computers in today’s business world, even the loss of a single machine or server can have heavy financial implications, says Leslie.“The only reason people back up is so that they can restore. But it is the speed of that restore that is very important – so is the freshness of it. The more I talked to resellers about the time it takes to repair a broken server, the more they said 24 hours to 48 hours.“So if a machine is out for one or two days, in today’s high dependence on computers, that is a big loss,” he says.The Business Continuity Appliance is designed to provide a recovery environment small to medium enterprises that will fill in for a failed server in a matter of hours, as opposed to days, says Leslie.