After all, today's business relies heavily on our IT systems to keep operations going. Take away those tools or systems, even temporarily, and much of Corporate America simply can't function.

Simply having a backup plan in place to recover from an outage is insufficient.  Today, businesses need a plan that ensures not only disaster recovery but business continuity (BC) as well. After all, do you really expect your customers, vendors -- and competitors -- to wait for days while you recover? 

Not a chance.

In developing your BC/DR plans, here are 5 tips that may be helpful:

• Optimize internal infrastructures to support both performance/profit and recoverability/resilience
• Balance internal and external DR solutions to give yourself more control and immediate access over your infrastructure
• Move beyond tape to data replication and virtual solutions, as other solutions have become more feasible
• Focus on compliance requirements as part of your BC/DR strategy as increasingly complex compliance trends continue
• Integrate IT with BC/DR -- as service continuity and resilience are key to today's BC/DR plans, full integration is essential

What worked five years ago will not sustain your business today. For a well-designed BC/DR plan, call or email us today.

You can ensure continuous productivity in your organization, even after server failure or data center calamity, if proper data security policies and backup/recovery solutions are in place.  Today, offsite data backups are a necessary investment to prevent downtime, loss of vital data or revenues and potential damage to your business.  Here's how to get started:

Assess Your Needs

Your needs depend on your overall data infrastructure, including type of business and the risk/reward of a backup solution.  For some, small-scale backup solutions like external hard disk drives or PC-based backup applications may suffice.  Mid-sized or larger organizations, those dealing in eCommerce or possessing critical data may need third party data software suites or remote data center mirroring.

Backup Remotely

Data backup solutions are a great investment and should be part of any data disaster plan prevention checklist.  While your data is stored and backed up locally, have another copy mirrored remotely on a data center elsewhere to ensure constant availability. This could save the day if you experience data loss at an inopportune time.

Backup Frequency

Generally, backups are performed during weekends since they may take hours to accomplish, depending on the size of your data repository and network connection speed. A day's worth of backup time may be sufficient for a 24/7 operation, and subsequent backups will probably take less time to complete.  But every business is different; ask us about your specific needs.