Few companies would argue about the value of a comprehensive Disaster Recovery plan that covers all areas of the business and holds the key to successfully resuming day to day business activity should the worst happen.
Most businesses would be pretty unlucky to suffer from major downtime due to things like fire, flood or theft. Terrorism generates a huge amount of column inches and the effects of something like 911 are truly devastating however even in the current climate these occurrences are thankfully few and for between.
What is more likely to happen is an email sever failure, a corrupt database or the network being compromised by a virus. Guarding against this type of outage should be the bare minimum a company should cater for, even though most of us could cope for a few hours without email, for some businesses this would lead to a huge loss in revenue.
If a server failed completely, most IT Departments wouldn’t promise delivery of the service back up and running normally in anything less that a day because this would mean relying on tape backups to rebuild the data held by the server. Commonly accepted logic is that tape isn’t all that reliable (a side issue is that most companies don’t perform regular tape restores, so don’t know how good the data on the tape is – even if they can get is back).
