Save Your Data and Your Business from Disaster
Natural disasters, terrorist activities, and rapidly spreading illnesses like influenza have pushed disaster recovery to the forefront for most organizations. However, disaster recovery does not limit itself to catastrophic events. Businesses should prepare for the more common, everyday "disasters" like a broken water pipe that floods the building, an ice storm that keeps employees from traveling to the office, or loss of power caused by a nearby construction project.
As organizations become more and more dependent on technology to deliver the critical data powering their businesses, there is an increasing awareness that if these systems go down, business can grind to a halt. Furthermore, missed opportunities, lost revenue and increasingly strict regulations mandating the protection and long-term retention of data adds to the critical need for Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity plans.
The goal in disaster recovery is business continuity. You want to keep core business functions operating smoothly under all circumstances. This requires that you and your employees have uninterrupted access to information, regardless of the situation.
One of the most critical aspects of a disaster recovery plan is enabling employees to work from home or other remote locations and access critical resources and data as if they were in the office. There are many ways to accomplish this, one of which is through application hosting.
Application hosting offers many advantages beyond disaster recovery, including accessing new business processes quickly and cost-effectively, automatic updates, back-up management and support by information technology professionals, lifting the burden of those activities from your staff. This makes application hosting particularly attractive to start-ups, small and medium-sized businesses.
Application hosting may be delivered as a subscription model allowing the client to pay for use of the application on a monthly or yearly basis. Alternatively, the client may own the software outright but have it deployed in the security and managed care of a data center, rather than managing the software internally.
Either way, application hosting takes one of your most valuable business assets -- your data -- and houses it safely and securely while allowing remote access from anywhere at any time you need it.
But what could be more advantageous to your business than reliable, disruption-free operations? So ask yourself the following questions:
- What would be the business impact and financial consequences resulting from lost data or losing access to data?
- What steps have you taken to protect hardware, software, data files, communications and other processing operations?
- How reliable are the backup systems you have in place?
- How quickly could your business recover from disaster?
Disaster recovery and business continuity planning involves more than off-site storage or backup processing. Organizations should address all the critical operations and functions of the business and how employees can continue to perform those functions, regardless of their location. Then you'll have a plan that will ensure the ongoing availability of critical resources and continuity of operations.
