With the recent hurricanes and events of the world, such as 9/11, it is vital that all businesses be able to recover their data no matter what happens to their physical building.



In addition to large disasters, smaller disasters such as building fires and vandalism happen to companies around the United States each and every day.

The ability to retrieve your data after any form of disaster can mean the difference between your business's ultimate success and failure. Your electronic data consists of all of its contacts, financial information, e-mail messages, documents, spreadsheets, databases, and so much more. In essence, your business's electronic data is the most valuable aspect of your business.

What is your company without any of your electronic data? If you lost all of your electronic data today, would you know who owes you money and be able to prove it in order to collect payments? Would you know what items you have in your inventory and which are currently on order? Would you know who all of your customers are and have a way to contact them?

Take a moment to think about any information for your company which sits on a computer or file server. What would your organization be tomorrow if all of that information just disappeared?

We have all seen the terrible aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. However, let's take a moment to look at it from an electronic data standpoint. Which companies were able to recover their valuable electronic data and which were not?

Companies which stored their data onsite via tape backup lost all of their data to the floodwaters. Companies which stored their data backup tapes offsite locally still lost their data due to the floodwaters at their offsite storage location. (For a small company, the offsite storage location of choice is generally at the business owner or IT Manager's home.)

For the companies who use offsite data storage through an online backup service far from their physical location, they were able to easily retrieve their data and salvage their business by restarting it up in another location if they chose to. When they evacuated, these organizations were able to continue with activity wherever they sought refuge.

As you can see in the example above, one of the best additions to any disaster recovery plan is the use of offsite data backup through an online backup service. Online backup services allow your business to easily backup your valuable electronic data onto their servers via a secure Internet connection. By using online data storage, you can insure that you have a copy of your valuable electronic data far away from your own physical location. No matter what happens in your local area: fire, flood, earthquake, hurricane, terrorist attack, etc., your company will ultimately still have access to its data.

A solid disaster recovery plan will ensure that your business is not lost due to circumstances beyond your control. By planning ahead and considering all of the things that could go wrong, you are protecting your business from total loss should something actually happen.

My guess is that there are a lot of establishments in the New Orleans area which now wish they had previously had a disaster recovery plan.