Is there a Glitch in Your Disaster Recovery and Busine Continuity Plan? by John Sharpe

All businesses using computer systems are vulnerable to serious incidents that could disrupt normal business operations. Companies recognize the need for a contingency plan to manage outages - planned or unplanned - but business continuity planning is complex, time consuming and sometimes not in budget.

Many companies don't keep their disaster recovery and business continuity plans updated or do regular disaster recovery testing. Companies hope they'll never have to use these plans, but in today's ever-virtual world, such hubris can be dangerous.

In a recent disaster recovery article, TechTarget estimates that each hour of downtime can cost a company $3K to $10K, depending on the complexity of the systems, the infrastructure involved and the type of outage that occurs.

The majority of outages, around 95 percent according to market surveys, are caused by application and software glitches, hardware failures, malware or viruses. These types of outages can cost 3 to 4 hours of downtime, or even 1 to 2 days of downtime in worst case scenarios. How would your business function, and more importantly how would you service your customers, if your organization couldn't operate for up to 48 hours?

If the worst happens, like the 2003 Northeast Blackout, Hurricane Sandy in 2012, or the current wildfires in California, could you failover to a secure, protected location in minutes and keep your company running during a disaster? While it's less likely a weather-related catastrophe will disrupt your business, it's still necessary to plan for such an event, just as with technical failures.

Iron Mountain, a trusted provider of information management for over 60 years, can help you prepare for disaster recovery events and assist you if and when an event occurs. We have several disaster recovery and business continuity services that can help prevent unplanned downtime due to a significant event or assist you when you have a planned outage due to an infrastructure upgrade or other maintenance event.

Offsite Tape Vaulting with Disaster Recovery Support: Tape continues to be a valued storage medium, especially when archiving large data sets for long periods of time. While you may be backing up to a storage device onsite or to the cloud, secondary backup storage with Iron Mountain provides extra assurance that your data is safe and accessible should a disaster recovery event occur.

Disaster Recovery Consulting and Testing: Our disaster recovery consulting services are aimed at helping you understand what you need to create a disaster recovery and business continuity plan to protect your systems. Once the plan is documented, Iron Mountain can assist with disaster recovery testing to ensure no potential threats have been overlooked.

Cloud Disaster Recovery Services: If you're looking to move to a cloud service, Iron Mountain can still help provide disaster recovery and business continuity assistance. We offer SLA-driven cloud disaster recovery failover services that enable you to failover to Iron Mountain from wherever your IT infrastructure resides should planned or unplanned outages occur.

A well-thought out disaster recovery and business continuity plan, paired with disaster recovery services provided by a trusted advisor like Iron Mountain, can help you recover quickly. And quick recovery is essential to your business' stability and longevity. Ready to take your data backup and disaster recovery to the next level? Download the free eBook.

LINK:	http://blogs.ironmountain.com/2015/service-lines/data-backup-and-recov...
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