Sunday, October 17, 2010

In the Event of a Fire

Fire Damage

Due to the many types of surfaces that can burn, residue and odors are complex. They can be difficult to remove, becoming trapped as surfaces cool. Although smoke and soot may seem to be identical, experienced professionals recognize the important differences, and appropriate emergency action can help in restoring walls and furnishings. Foresight and experience may be the deciding factor in an item being a loss or restorable.

Rainbow International provides professional removal of all smoke residue through the use of well-trained, certified technicians and professional cleaning products. We use state-of-the art techniques (ozone and air space deodorisation with hot fogging) to eliminate the damage.

In the event of fire or smoke damage, do the following:

  • Stay calm!
  • Inventory contents.
  • Open all windows.
  • Empty freezer and refrigerator completely if electricity is off. Prop open doors.
  • Remove pets (especially birds) to clean environments

Rainbow International will:

  • Professionally clean upholstery, carpets, walls, and all other contents.
  • Clean and protect chrome trim and hardware on kitchen fixtures and appliances.
  • Clean and protect bathroom fixtures from smoke damage.
  • Gently wash plants on both sides of leaves with water.

Do not attempt the following:

  • Wiping or washing the walls, ceilings, or other absorbent surfaces.
  • Using upholstered furniture if it can be avoided.
  • Using exposed food goods or canned goods that have been subject to excessive heat.
  • Use TVs, stereos, or any other electrical appliances until cleaned and checked.
  • Sending smoked garments to an ordinary dry cleaner, because improper cleaning may set the smoke/odour.
  • Turn on your heating and air conditioning system if it is not currently on.

Saturday, October 16, 2010

What If This Happened to
Your Business?
When protecting your business data, you should have at least the following three systems in place: RAID, offsite backup, and disk imaging.


RAID

RAID stands for "redundant array of inexpensive disk." It is a technology of having multiple hard drives in your server to protect your data and allows your server to continue operating when a hard drive fails. Your operating system, applications and files are duplicated on two or more disks, so if a single disk fails, you can continue to work until the failed disk is replaced (TIP: don't wait as the other disks will typically fail within days or weeks.)


RAID is a business continuity method, not a data backup method. Yes, it preserves your data if your hard drive fails, put won't protect your data against fire, flood, earthquake or theft or other disaster.


Offsite Data Backup

Every business needs to keep a backup of their data offsite in case of a natural disaster or theft. The easiest method is to use an offsite data backup service such as AxiVault which encypts your data then uploads it each night to a secure data center. This method is easy, automated and fully managed and monitored by our techs.


Another method of offsite backup is to use external hard drives which are rotated offsite. If using external hard drives as your offsite backup strategy, you must use data backup or disk imaging software that will encrypt the data in case the hard drives are stolen from your car or home. This method is a manual process which makes it inconsistent and less reliable as the offsite data backup service above.


Disk Imaging

If you only backup your data files and disaster strikes, you will have to purchase a new server, install the operating system, install updates and patches, configure the server, reinstall all your applications, and restore your data. This process may take 10 to 14 days. Must businesses cannot be without an operational server for that long.


Luckily there is readily available disk imaging software available that will allow you to restore an image of your old server onto new server hardware. This will cut your recovery time to a 2 or 3 days.



Putting It All Together

1. Verify that your server is using hardware-based RAID.

2. Subscribe to an offsite data backup service, such as AxiVault.

3. Use disk imaging software with an external hard drive or NAS device. A copy of the disk image needs to be offsite in case of disaster.




Thursday, October 7, 2010

Dont Annoy Your Clients

annoy: (uh-‘noi) verb: to disturb or irritate especially by repeated acts

The last thing we want to do is annoy them.

It’s never our intent. But our intent doesn’t matter.

What we do matters.

Here are the sales facts…

They don’t like it when…

And, they can’t stand it when we won’t take no for an answer.

What do they like?

A return on their investment (to get more, to save more, to look good, to feel good, to be loved).

That’s it.

Anything else and we’re wasting their time (and ours).

Don’t be sales dumb. Be SalesBright.

(Managers: One way to be sure you and your team avoid annoying)

Now go sell something.~>