For a moment lets pretend we are a few years in the future. You have become a very successful businessperson and your company is booming. You have powerful business partners, big-name clients, and an endless amount of opportunities for you to consider. Since it's conception, your business's goals have been quality, efficiency, and customer satisfaction; and now things are paying off! Things are going so good that you again put off the planning of your data center disaster recovery plan, knowing it could keep you away from a few sales.
Jumping ahead a few more years, you are now broke. A one time respected entrepreneur now turned into a bum with no job and not even a few cents to your name. The people you used to associate with are now embarrassed to be seen with you, and those endless opportunities are now busy knocking at someone else's door. What could have possibly happened to you? Where did you go wrong? Let's retrace your steps to see if we can find the mishap.
It was a year ago when things went wrong. The inevitable happened. All your data vanished; all the important files that made enabled your company to function are gone. Your employees advise you to simply recover all the files from your computer backup system, but you have to advise them you decided to not get one. Your business partners are calling not stop to find out what your hold up is in production and when things will be back to normal, but you have nothing to tell them. One by one your clients are jumping ship and turning to better prepared businesses and there is no way to retain them. Within a few weeks your once flourishing company has been reduced to rubble.
As you are cleaning out your office you find that old proposal for the data center disaster recovery plan in a pile of unimportant papers. If only you had given it the time required things would have been back to normal before anyone outside your company even noticed.
Although horrific, this is a very likely scenario for any company that is not prepared with a data center disaster recovery plan. When a disaster strikes, most of these companies end up having to close their doors within two years and more than one third never return to operations again. Even scarier, only about one tenth of these companies are able to recover and survive the mishap, though their businesses suffer an untellable amount in the recovery.
For these reasons it is imperative to not turn a blind eye over and over again on establishing a data center disaster recovery plan. Yes, the above scenario is a worst-case deal, but do you really want to take the risk of coming anywhere close to such a mishap?
You should know that developing a data center disaster recovery plan is actually pretty easy, provided you have a solid computer backup system to protect your data. These programs are the central core to all data center disaster recovery plans are provide you with what you need to not only preserve, but to recover your data should the unthinkable happens.
The best part is that money is not even really an issue for a computer backup system. With today's technology the reliability, effectiveness, and cost of computer backup systems allow even small businesses to take advantage of the protection they provide.
As you can see there are no excuses for not being prepared with a data center disaster recovery plan. If you do not currently have a data center disaster recovery plan I can not urge you enough to get started on one right away. God forbid your company ends up like the one in the scenario illustrated above, and you end up like the poor chap stumbling upon that unapproved proposal for a data center disaster recovery plan after it is too late.
There really is no excuse for not getting started on a data center disaster recovery plan as soon as possible. Making it a priority should guarantee that you won't be wishing you approved it only after the worst has done its worst.
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