Picture the sheer horror of the following scenario to a business owner:  You arrive at work to be told that your IT system has gone down and that all the data may be lost? You ask your in company IT specialist how long it will take to restore the back up and you are told the backup has also failed and all of a sudden the sheer horror of the situation sinks home as you realise have lost your entire businesses data .

IT is the lifeblood of any organisation and those who fail to take the correct steps to protect it do so at their peril. Loss of data is a major threat to businesses of all sizes – from single desktop operations to multi-networked concerns.

Any IT solution should not be restricted to the basics like computer support , but should also take into account business continuity planning.

The sad fact is that nobody can predict if a business or a consumer is likely to suffer from a data loss emergency, but there are a number of areas that are generally prone potential problems which could arise from a basic electrical power surge, electronic or mechanical failure or even a sabotage attempt by a disgruntled employee. You also have to consider acts of nature i.e floods, storms or even natural disasters depending on your locality.

There is a lot more interest being taken in the topic of business continuity recently, but the implementation of disaster recovery solutions has been pretty hit and miss for many companies and businesses, many of which still rely on aging tape back up technology. One of the biggest failings is testing the system that has been put in place and many companies have felt the pain of the backup simply not being available in their hour of need.

This then leads to the need for far more expensive data recovery or raid data recovery as a method of hopefully retrieving vital data.

Many companies are now investing in remote data backup models as part of their business continuity strategy as these have a number of significant advantages.

For example, remote backup does not rely on restoration from tape devices, but instead lost data can be accessed almost immediately directly from a secure location regardless of the time of day or even where you are trying to access the data from. So there is no worry that the backup did not work or the tape was possibly faulty, or even that the backup device has failed and you can’t get a model that can read your tapes.

An effective business continuity plan as long as it has been implemented can be the difference between the survival or failure of a business going forward, so to fully understand the implications of a data loss emergency ask yourself some very serious questions: could your business carry on if you lost all of your customer records or what would be the impact on our business if we lost all our computer aided design data.

And of course on a final note, once you have implemented a business continuity plan make sure you test it to make sure the plan is robust in a real environment.

For more help and advice visit the data recovery Manchester website.