Many businesses risk grave losses due to failures and disasters yet continue to depend on un-validated tape backups should they need to recover from a major outage. Implementing a disaster recovery plan can be time consuming and daunting; to the point which many simply put it off.

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

• Why do I need a Disaster Recovery (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.

The first thing you need to do is understand what is important to your business. Identify those systems that are critical to the running of your business, be it an email server, bespoke financial package or other data, building a continuity plan will help you recover these systems in the most cost effective, efficient way possible.

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.

Have your data backed up securely offsite, even in the event of a total loss of premises your data can be available in a different location with minimal fuss. Traditional tape backups although adequate if set up correctly can and do fail recovery is a lengthy process even for a single file. Other technologies such as data replication and remote offsite backup are more efficient, simpler and more reliable.

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 and remote 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.