Despite the warnings and headlines about the latest serious data loss, many small businesses have no disaster plan in place at all. A Symantec survey also revealed that half of all businesses with Disaster Recovery [DR] plans are not actually ready to implement them - and an astonishing 77% of CEOs are still taking no active role in DR planning.

In the current economic climate, where the margins between success and failure get tighter, SMEs in particular must realise that it is imperative to seek protection in the face of adversity.

Yet research among 200 contact centres worldwide has shown just 36% of companies are confident they could survive a business disruption without their customers being affected. With so many companies opting to gamble with their very existence, it begs the question of why business continuity and disaster recovery are not a greater priority.

InTechnology has a broad range of cost -effective services which can help to see businesses through difficult times. With the right preparation and investment, a business can in fact thrive on these challenges - rather than struggle to survive them.

Turning disaster into triumph

‘Disaster' can take many different forms but, for the purposes of business continuity and DR planning, it is essentially an event that impacts to such an extent on the ability of an organisation to go about its business that the viability of the business itself - and possibly its staff, customers and business partners - may be threatened.

The first step, of course, is to avoid the disaster. But if you can't then have your response prepared. Proper DR planning makes either scenario perfectly possible. It means having a realistic and well understood set of objectives based on your business needs, combined with the right preparation and investment. A prerequisite is to have your systems already set up for recovery, documenting and rehearsing every step of the way that allows you to do that - including regular review of the DR plan and process itself.

The most common sort of potential disaster involving IT is a network or server failure. These things happen to a business somewhere every day. If your business doesn't have plans in place to avoid such a common occurrence, or to rapidly recover from one, it's probably living on borrowed time.

Many businesses routinely underestimate the complexity of disaster and data recovery, or lack the courage or commitment to confront the real possibility of things going wrong. People are frightened to imagine the most extreme event. But if you can't imagine it then the certainty is that you can't possibly be prepared for it.

A perfect replica of your data

InTechnology's Managed Replication Service (MRS) is a revolution in data recovery and business continuity. Using ‘traditional' data backup techniques you can easily lose a whole day of business data, the value of which could be incalculable. The Managed Replication Service is based on continuous synchronisation and consequently enables the recovery of data to the precise point at which a failure occurred. Customers can replicate key data up to the minute, such as on mail and application servers, to InTechnology's remote, geographically dispersed data centre for DR purposes and fast recovery.

Peace of mind for London law firm

A prime example of this in practice is law firm Denton Wilde Sapte - an international law firm, headquartered in the City of London, with over 600 lawyers and a network of offices spanning the UK, Europe, Middle East, CIS and Africa.

The firm had twin requirements for its data - efficient backup of its increasing volumes and secure offsite data storage to assure business continuity. With its head office in the City of London and offices in other major UK business centres, business continuity was an important issue to be addressed. Data has to be available for rapid retrieval in case of disaster recovery and to assure business continuity at all times.

"The need to get our data to an offsite, secure location was a key issue for us," explains IT Director, Neil Pamment.

The firm has achieved both these objectives with a combined set of Managed Services from InTechnology. The Managed Backup Service assures rapid and secure offsite data backup and restores for business continuity, while the Managed Archiving Service provides efficient offsite management of non-urgent data.

"Like all law firms, we were experiencing rapid growth in data volumes but we saw how we could use the Managed Backup and Archiving services together to address our issues. We are delighted with the way the services are working, meeting our two main objectives with one solution," concludes Neil Pamment.

For more information about Intechnology visit www.intechnology.co.uk [1]