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Frighteningly a very high percentage of business around the world are only a very short step away from total data loss even though they believe they are all ok. A principal culprit here is un-validated tape back ups. Simply put many companies go through a tape backup procedure but in the event of a problem it is only then that they realise the company back up has failed

Through some basic steps, businesses can better protect themselves against catastrophic data loss, these steps include:

• · Why do I need a Disaster Recovery Plan (DR) plan?
• · Defining and planning
• · Implementation
• · Testing

Fire, flood, human error, hardware failure and malicious acts can all cause a small business to at best suffer financial losses, at worst and is far too often the case, shut down for good, every business is susceptible to some king of outage, the need to plan for a disaster is real and needs to be carried out.

One of the most important aspects of a disaster recovery program is to ascertain what are the critical elements of your business. This will vary from business to business so for some it could be to ensure that data subject to long term availability due to legislation is always protected and for others it could be that the value of the business is held in the company CRM database. Whatever the case make sure your DR plan encompasses your most valuable assets at the very least.

Your plan should enable you to bring your business back online as rapidly as possible. Down time is very costly and without putting to fine a point on it the more employees you have the worse a few hours of loss production will be when you take into account the economies of scale.

Remote data backup is a useful tool to have in your disaster recovery portfolio. Many companies will have data and tape back up data stored on company premises. In the event of a major catastrophe such as a fire all company data could be lost. Utilising offsite remote data backup ensure that data is still safe and could even be accessed from another location if required.

Every company will have different requirements so it is always worthwhile to have internal discussions to ascertain each departments principal requirements. Once this is done requirements can be broken down into manageable portions and sections to ensure nothing critical is missed from the plan or overlooked during your internal assessments.

And last but not least test test test! Sadly numerous stories abound of companies that have set up a DR plan of sorts then simply assumed it would work. You need to ensure your plan is robust and tested on a regular basis to ensure key personnel are practiced in its implementation.

Disaster recovery planning, data recovery service and online data backup protocols should be in place for every business that has critical business data and systems. Don’t wait until it is to late and disaster has already struck.