Disaster Recovery: Protect Your Business From More Than Just "Disasters"
By: ATX Dialogue
To read this article in our HTML-based e-newsletter, ATX Dialogue, please visit http://www.atx.com/dialoguesept2003/disasterrecovery.html
Since September of 2001, the buzz phrase "disaster recovery" has been thrown around in the media without much regard for its actual meaning.
Essentially, disaster recovery can be defined as a plan to preserve your business operations or data in the event of a significant, unforeseen challenge. Disaster, in this case, can include fire or destruction of your business location, destruction of the facilities (network, power, etc.) that service your location, or simply loss of computers, servers, or data.
While you will hopefully never need to implement it, a solid disaster recovery plan is essential for every business. In fact, 93% of companies without a recovery plan go out of business within 5 years of losing data. (Disaster Recovery Planning: Managing Risk and Catastrophe in Information Systems - John William Toigo).
The primary step to protecting your business in the event of a disaster is a solid data backup procedure. Most businesses typically use one of the popular software packages to backup their network server and customer data to a tape media. Unfortunately, the tape is generally not tested, so businesses may not know if the backup process is working until they need to recover lost data. In fact, the term "disaster recovery" is somewhat of a misnomer since of all the causes of data loss, natural disaster is generally the lowest, while failed tape media ranks as the highest.
Your Basic Disaster Recovery Plan
In order to avoid the traditional pitfalls of tape backup, it is strongly recommended that data be backed up to a hard disk at a remote location. However, most small- to medium-sized businesses do not have the network infrastructure or an alternate location to be able to support a remote backup plan.
ATX's new EVault services can fulfill this need. Our outsourced, managed service provides automated data protection and recovery for small- to mid-sized organizations that have limited IT infrastructure and/or IT staff. At the customer's convenience, servers are scanned for changed data, and then changed file blocks are assembled, compressed, encrypted and sent over the Internet to a remote server at our secure managed data center.
ATX EVault Services Can:
- Save you up to 40% over your existing tape backup costs
- Dramatically increase your ability to recover data in a disaster by having your data stored off-site
- Free up your IT resources for more strategic business objectives by fully automating the back up process
- Reduce the time it takes you to perform your backup and the amount of storage by up to 70%
It's clear the issue of disaster recovery is one that is not truly just for "disasters". Ensure your business' recovery from a data loss by implementing a backup plan today.
Contact ATX
For more information on ATX's EVault product or to arrange a free consultation, please contact an E-Business Consultant at 800-220-ATX2 or e-mail scott.kinka@atx.com.
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