Disaster recovery planning and implementation is the practice of ensuring that data is adequately protected and can be recovered in a timely manner after data loss occurs.

Data loss can occur in any number of ways including human error, a computer virus, hardware or system failure, software corruption, theft, or a natural disaster.

Small and medium-sized businesses without dedicated information technology (IT) staff are particularly vulnerable. It is therefore extremely important to have a disaster recovery plan documented and to periodically test the plan to ensure that it meets the needs of the business.

Disaster recovery plan writing by Compudata - should detail the customer's data assets and document how each asset is backed up and restored. It should also include policies regarding media storage, media rotation, and security, as well as procedures for natural disasters.

Data is often categorized by value and may be classified as mission-critical, organization-critical, non-critical, and end user.

We Compudata can give you backup and recovery tools that can assist in protecting data. The backup utility is included in the following operating systems:

• Microsoft Windows® XP/Vista - User data stored on desktop and laptop computers is not often included in centralized backup operations because of the time, cost, and IT knowledge required to support such an effort. The included backup utility provides an easy-to-use wizard that helps users back up data and system information to removable media.
  
• Microsoft Windows Server - For server-based networks, administrators often redirect a user's My Documents folder to a server to assist in protecting data. The included backup utility supports automated scripting and can be used to regularly back up server data including user and server application files.
  
• Microsoft Windows Small Business Server - The included backup utility is designed to protect user and system data as well as data from Microsoft Exchange Server 2003 and Microsoft SQL Server 2000. The automated wizard makes it easy for administrators to prepare for a "bare metal restore" (rebuild with new hardware).

What would you do if you woke up and your business or place of work no longer existed?

Statistics that we can share include:

• 93% of companies that lost their data center for ten days or more as a result of a disaster filed for bankruptcy within one year of the disaster. 50% of businesses that found themselves without data management for this same time period filed for bankruptcy immediately. (Source: Microsoft)
  
• 30% of companies report that they still do not have a disaster recovery program in place and two in three companies feel that their data backup and disaster recovery plans have significant vulnerabilities. Furthermore, only 59% of companies polled test their data backup and storage systems at least once a quarter. Conducting a regular external audit of backup and restore systems is far from a common practice - only 32% report conducting an external audit.
  
• At what point is the survival of your company at risk? 40% said 72 hours, 21% said 48 hours, 15% said 24 hours, 8% said 8 hours, 9% said 4 hours, 3% said 1 hour, 4% said within the hour. (Source: On track - 2001 Cost of Downtime Survey Results, 2001)
  
• 30% of all businesses that have a major fire go out of business within a year. 70% fail within five years. (Source: Home Office Computing Magazine)
  
• Computer virus attacks cost businesses an estimated $55 billion USD in damages in 2003.
  
• File corruption and data loss are becoming much more common, although loss of productivity continues to be the major cost associated with a virus disaster. (Source: 7th Annual ICSA Lab's Virus Prevalence Survey, March 2002)

We Compudata can help small and medium-sized businesses address data protection cost effectively.

            
       Add our Managed Backup & Disaster Recovery Solution to your network.

Replaces management intensive, error-prone tape backups while providing much more.

• No need to deal with failed scheduled backups, having to scale back backup jobs due to limited tape capacity or worry about replacing out of warranty backup hardware.

• No tape backup units, no tapes, REV disks or cleaning cartridges – no need to ever purchase, replace, change or store media cartridges offsite again.

• Backups are performed as frequently as every 15 minutes providing clients with an increased amount of restore points when compared to traditional tape backups.

• Data backup is performed at the block level where the actual 1’s and 0’s are captured from the hard drive essentially eliminating failures related to open files. Block transfer is the most efficient way to write to a disk.

• Advanced restorations features including file and folder level restorations and bare metal restorations to dissimilar hardware.

• Offline "Virtual Server” capabilities significantly reduce network downtime in the event of Server failure. In the event that the original Server fails, the backup device can be configured to perform as a “Virtual Server” until the original Server can be repaired or replaced.

• In the event of an office disaster where the data on the original Server(s) are lost, the on-site backup NAS devices, with the most current backup could solve the problem.