Does DR apply to Small Businesses too?

Disaster Recovery Planning is for big companies - isn't it?

The common misconception is that disaster recovery planning is only for large corporations. However unplanned downtime affects companies of all sizes impacting revenue, customer satisfaction, and overall productivity - each essential to compete in today's fast-paced business environment and critical to new businesses or small/medium enterprises who can base much on their customer perception and reputation in the market place.

But surely the risk of something major happening is low -is it worth the money?

Typically, people think of disaster recovery planning as planning for natural disasters such as fires, earthquakes, and floods. However, the most common types of incidents, can be equally as destructive:

Theft, Computer viruses, Hardware and software failure, human error and ucontrolled circumstances are equally as possible such as the recent black outs in power in New York, London and Milan, or earlier this year viruses such as MSBlast.

Without a regimented backup routine and complementary disaster recovery plan in place, the loss of a server and the data it contains could mean the imminent demise of your company.
Statistics show that 90 percent of businesses that lose their data from any type of disaster fail to recover and are forced to close their doors within two years.

So how can SMEs create a disaster recovery plan for their business within their budget that can grow as their company grows?

The primary concern will be how to balance the degree of protection with the level of risk and available budget. A business needs to be able to assess how critical its data is to the business - a small legal firm may be only 20% reliant on their IT systems for filing, storage of data or communication, where a small internet company would not be able to afford any level of down time.

The foundation for any disaster recovery plan is to ensure that data is backed up. At the very minimum backup tapes should be stored both offsite (to enable recovery from a site disaster) with a duplicate stored onsite so you are able to quickly recover the data from minor incidents such as a disk or application failure.

The VERITAS Backup and Recovery product lines offer tape duplication capabilities that make planning for offsite tape storage easier.

VERITAS Backup Exec for NT/Windows 2000
VERITAS Backup Exec is the industry standard backup solution providing Microsoft certified compatibility for Windows NT and Windows 2000 environments. Built-in virus protection and an intuitive user interface provide a reliable and easy to use data protection solution. Combined with the many available options, Backup Exec provides a complete scalable solution for any size network and any level user.

Backup Exec Intelligent Disaster Recovery Option
When integrated into the backup routine, the Intelligent Disaster Recovery (IDR) Option can turn a major disaster into a minor inconvenience. IDR provides system administrators with the peace of mind and speed that comes with performing an automated recovery process by minimizing the potential for human error associated with a manual recovery process. The bare metal restore capability provides fast recovery without having to completely reinstall the operating system should a server go down.

Extending the protection
A great deal of important corporate data is held on users' desktops and laptops which are much more susceptible to theft or hardware failure. However, traditional means of backing them up is time consuming, and relies on the user to initiate it.

VERITAS NetBackup Professional brings automated data protection to desktops and mobile laptops by delivering transparent backup and comprehensive recovery capabilities for Windows clients.

Beyond backup & recovery
Backup provides users with the basic recovery tools for data availability, but solutions such as a Volume Manager come with proactive monitoring and maintenance tools that will help to prevent disasters. A Volume Manager can also be used to help set up mirroring of data and should be able to mirror data across multiple disks - with more disks holding redundant data, the likelihood of surviving failure increases.

VERITAS Volume Manager™ is for organisations that require constant and consistent access to mission critical data. Volume Manager provides easy-to-use, online storage management tools, which reduce planned and unplanned downtime.
Replication

One of the key considerations for DR planning is to determine which applications are most important i.e. the ones that would cause the most significant loss if they were unavailable. Traditional backup and recovery is often not fast enough to handle the recovery of the very large databases used by these mission-critical applications. That's why many companies today implement data replication tools to keep an up-to-date hot standby of their most critical data for immediate point-of-failure recovery.

VERITAS Storage Replicator™ for Windows NT and Windows 2000
The VERITAS Volume Replicator and Storage Replicator products can be used to provide seamless data replication of any database.
It supports data replication via a LAN or WAN, so that the replicated data can also be stored far enough away to protect against a site disaster. Additional benefits include not requiring a dedicated network and not being dependent on any vendor-specific storage hardware platform.

VERITAS has a solution for protection from any type of disaster. The tools and simple user interfaces help to reduce the reliance on individuals in the event of any disaster, which is clearly one of the objectives in good disaster recovery planning. They also enable you to make seamless changes due to growth or system changes.
Nonetheless, good disaster recovery planning starts with
a plan.