IN a recent Business Continuity market survey conducted by OpenSky Research, only 12% of respondents were completely confident their company is doing enough to protect their IT systems. Flood, power outages, hurricanes, earthquakes, malicious attacks and more – the potential for disasters have never been greater for today’s businesses. What’s more, disaster recovery has become even more critical for industries such as financial services, legal and government that face strict compliance and regulatory requirements. You need more than typical backup or replication systems. Simply having a second server on your site is not enough. That’s why businesses now understand the ability to recover data quickly and completely after a disaster is vital to business continuity. Vast quantities of data now reside in remote offices and branch locations, making back-up of distributed data a strategic imperative. Unfortunately, tape back-up methods are not always ideally suited to this challenge. Once-a-day back-ups leave you vulnerable to data losses. Lack of adequate IT staff can result in inconsistent procedures and failed back-ups. Managing media at many sites makes back-up costly and cumbersome A higher level of protection for distributed PC data is necessary. While sensitive data is increasingly well protected behind the firewall, it is far more vulnerable when moved to laptops and PCs outside the network boundary. Because they require action by busy end-users, many data protection policies are difficult to enforce, resulting in security lapses that expose corporations to the risks and costs of data loss. The management of the business have a responsibility to recover from such incidents in the minimum amount of time, with minimum disruption and at minimum cost. This requires careful preparation and planning, and an IT partner who knows how to help or, even better, who can help prevent such a problem happening in the first place. It is vital that the organisation takes the development and maintenance of the disaster recovery or business continuity plan seriously. It is not one of those tasks that can be left until everyone has time to deal with it. A serious incident can affect the organisation at any time and this can include the next 24 hours. The contingency plan needs to be developed by a team representing all functional areas of the organisation. Avoiding such unpleasant IT surprises which can be caused by natural catastrophes, viruses, security breaches, overworked servers or misuse of equipment is now a priority for many companies. There are advanced, proactive services available, which can help to avoid any of those problems and keep IT systems performing no matter what happens. Mark Joynson is regional managing director of IT specialists Technology Services Group. TSG provides consultancy, computer networks, software, training and service to over 1,000 businesses across the North- East. www.tsg.com (0845) 15-50-180. | 
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