Disaster Recovery Support Services

Rapid recovery of business data to ensure business continuity

Every day in the news there are stories about natural disasters that destroy offices, and occasionally major office buildings. Simply due to these regular news reports, organizations should understand that bad things can happen. Every company must have the ability to protect their people and recover their data quickly and completely if a disaster does strike.

• A quick recovery following a disaster is critical to business continuity. There are many options to support your disaster preparedness and response. The most common is to handle things yourself, which means that the person who is responsible for business continuity had better always be at work and have an excellent plan in place.
• A second, safer option, is to hire an organization to do this or you. The services are not free, but after the initial setup cost the ongoing is not that expensive. A private firm storing your data will normally have at least 2 copies of electronic data in different locations. Having 2 locations is to the answer the question asked by nearly every client 'what happens if YOU have a disaster?' and where would we go from there?

What You Must Cover

If you are wise, from the core of your data center to the imaginary line where your internet access leaves the building is included. Every server, mainframes, PC, and all of your physical records. Your backup should also include the telephone system. Imagine moving into rented office space with all of your computer data intact and not having any clue of the extensions for the people manipulating that data. Not a good idea.

Disaster Recovery Support Services

Assess the impact of the different levels of a disaster before it hits.

A disaster can mean a car crashes into the point where your phone and power lines enter your building leaving you without power for a week. The same accident can cause a fire, leaving you without service for 2 weeks. The same accident can also take out the air conditioning - vital for a data center and telephone system. A complex condition that can stop a company for weeks.

A disaster can also be someone tripping over a cord and breaking the hard drive and network card in an old PC under someones desk. The unfortunate server that serves as the vital storage point for all your customer phone records.

Hiring a company does give you the option of getting your organization back on its feet rapidly if the worst does happen. A professional company will reduce the risk that vital data will be lost due to a disaster and ensure a rapid recovery of corporate data. An external company does not depend on one employee who may leave for a better post on a sunny Tuesday afternoon.

What You Can Do

Probably the most important thing it to prepare your employees to respond quickly when disaster of any kind hits. This does not mean picking up the papers off their desk and running out the door, but to have already consistently backed up all of their data. Don't make conditions about personal and private data, it is easy to back up a PC every night, but an effort to make sure that every file is stored in the right location so that only important data is safe.

Any paper that is really needed should be scanned and stored on the network. Few people think of this, but after a fire it would be nice to have at least a scan of you insurance policy and a scanned copy of your receipts for the insurance adjuster.

Implement best practices for recovery across all locations. Develop a team that has this as their responsibility.

To create requirements for safeguarding sensitive data may sound hard, but it is actually easy. The most important is to not let employees store data on their PC except as a copy. Most IT teams can set up a process so any saved document automatically gets saved on a central server.

The most important is to back your servers us off site, at least daily. Some organizations have a real-time backup, so any file saved on a users PC is backed up on a local server, and that server is backed up off site. Data that is THE MOST IMPORTANT would be stored in 2 external locations that are on different sides of the country, so not matter what happens at least one part of the data is safe. A sad reminder, the basement of the World Trade Center had backup storage facilities in their basements. Some of the best storage facilities in the world, and they were gone in one sad morning.

06 Jan 2009 20:50:20

Kroger uses loyalty data to target coupons - The Associated Press

The Associated Press Kroger uses loyalty data to target coupons The Associated Press - Kroger's part ownership of a data mining firm allows it to put the reams of information its shopper cards collect to use in more ways than other retailers ... Kroger mines customer data to send coupons

Подробнее: http://google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5g4aOK0HuId1Q6o~

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