Industry Perspectives 2011: Disaster Recovery

Health Check For Your Disaster Recovery Plan - If you’re over 30, you know that regular medical check-ups are key to staying healthy and to early detection of any serious medical conditions. If you’re in IT, you know that having a fully tested Disaster Recovery Plan in place is vital to the health of your business. Richard Dolewski, Chief Technology Officer and Vice President of Business Continuity Services for WTS, wrote this column.

Disaster Recovery Plans: Practice Makes Perfect - When it comes to backup and recovery, only regular testing will ensure success. Business success is directly tied to the availability of our computer systems, and the common goal of companies today is to accept no tolerance for downtime. Business disasters can happen at any time, anywhere. Richard Dolewski also contributed this.

Huge Data Growth and Effective Disaster Recovery - The top data protection concern for large enterprises is the speed at which their already massive data volumes are growing, according to our third annual survey of sizable companies. This isn’t surprising. Joe Forgione, senior vice president of product operations and business development at SEPATON, Inc., wrote this column.

A Better Way to Recover from Hurricanes - The potential for disaster is fairly easy to calculate if your data center is in line with Hurricane Alley. During the 2011 Hurricane Season, tropical storms and hurricanes will thunder through Florida, barrel up the East Coast or crash onto the shores of the Gulf States, bringing with them floods, power outages and wind damage. Izzy Azeri, senior vice president and general manager, Acronis Americas, contributed this advice on recovery from hurricanes.

IT Lessons Learned from Hurricanes - It’s astounding to see how many organizations do not plan for disaster, or even feel the need for a disaster plan. According to the Gulf Coast Back to Business Act (2007), Congress finds that 43 percent of businesses that close following a natural disaster never reopen. An additional 29 percent of businesses close down permanently within two years (Library of Congress 2009). A popular oversight when weighing the risks and probability of disaster is that natural disasters are infrequent. Author, Yehuda Cagen is the Director of Client Services of Houston IT consulting firm Xvand Technology Corporation, and many Houston-area companies were affected by Hurricane Ike in September 2008.

Advantages of Disaster Recovery as a Service - Many businesses rely on Disaster Recovery (DR) services to prevent either man-made or natural disasters from causing expensive service disruptions. Unfortunately, current DR services come either at very high cost or with weak guarantees about the amount of data lost and time required to restart operation after a failure. However, with cloud computing and virtualization opening up a plethora of opportunities, business enterprises are discovering that a lot of applications can be availed as services, DR being no exception. This column was written by Nitin Mishra, VP, Product Management & Solutions Engineering, Netmagic Solutions Pvt. Ltd.