Richard's Blog » Are you prepared for a disaster?
A few posts ago I talked about the importance of backups. A recent article brought this to my attention again though it was discussing Disaster Recovery rather than just backups: Symantec have found that most Small / Medium Businesses are unprepared for when disaster strikes.
Small and midsize businesses are confident in their disaster recovery capabilities, but their actual performance preventing outages shows they are "remarkably unprepared," according to a Symantec survey.
Ninety-three percent of New Zealand and Australian respondents were satisfied with their disaster-recovery plans, and only a quarter from the region believed customers would seek options other than waiting patiently for an outage to be fixed.[/color] [color=blue]However, the practices of these businesses suggest this confidence is unwarranted. Symantec says the average SMB has experienced three outages in the past 12 months, with the leading causes in Australia and New Zealand being a disaster, a power outage, virus or hacker attacks and employees accidentally deleting data.
-- full article in Reseller news
Disaster Recovery is the ability to get your business up and running again should it suffer failure of some type whether it be the loss of premises through fire or flood, sudden departure of key employees, loss of data, hardware failure or any number of other untoward events.
What would you do if your computer system failed and you had an important contract to complete within a few days? Could you confidently say that you would be able to complete the contract? Would you have all the information you required to hand? Would you be able to get your system back up and running the next day?
in the post about backups I detailed our tape backup system. However, our backups go much further than that. We also have redundant disks in our server, backup changed data on an hourly basis to a second server and also conduct backups to staff computers overnight. You may consider this to be overkill but having lost some important data some seven years ago we consider this regime to be of vital importance.
The redundant disks in the primary server ensure that we will lose no data should one of the disks fail. The hourly backup of changed data to a second server gives us the capability of being up and running within an hour after a major server failure, and in the event of accidental data deletion we can restore the previous days data from the staff computers within minutes without having to resort to tape.
You may consider this to be beyond the capabilities of a small business or too expensive to justify. It isn't beyond your means - and what price do you put on your data? How important is it to you?
CLAD Services is a small business, albeit one with the technical knowledge and ability to make this happen. We can design and implement a suitable and affordable Disaster Recovery system for your computer system. We can also look at your business and provide advice on other ways of reducing the risk of disasters and other untoward events that could have an adverse effect on your day to day work.
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