Disaster Recovery

The title of this one pretty well spells it out for you. If your company had an IT disaster - a building fire, a massive theft of hardware including all your servers, a new virus that wiped out all your computers - what would you do?

Wikipedia, the online FREE encyclopedia, does a bang up job explaining Disaster Recovery. They describe Disaster Recovery as part of something bigger - a Business Continuity Plan.

For argument's sake, lets say, you were able to quickly obtain a new building, new equipment, new furniture. Everything. Just one thing missing. Your data.

A Disaster Recovery Plan takes this into account. This means quickly acquiring your data from your offsite storage site. This means rebuilding the Servers and Workstations as quickly as possible, in order to access the data that was retrieved in order to RESUME BUSINESS.

No business can afford to duplicate every piece of equipment and every shred of data, in the event of a Disaster. However, EVERY business can set aside funds, in order to mitigate the severity of a Disaster were one to occur.

Ways of mitigating Data Disaster:

• Backups made to Tape* and sent offsite daily
• Backups made to disk on-site and off-site
• Replication of data to an off-site location
• High availability systems which keep both the data and system replicated off-site, enabling continuous access to systems and data

*Tape in this context can be replaced by any form of removable media - blue ray, dvd, cd-r, and hard drive cartridges.