Earthquake in Virginia: Is Your Business Ready for a Disaster?

By Michael Miller

This week we recently experienced an earthquake on the east coast in Virginia. We haven’t had an earthquake of this magnitude in nearly 100 years on the east coast. As I sat outside for lunch watching traffic lights sway, bricks falling, buildings being evacuated and fire alarms ringing throughout Alexandria, I couldn't help but wonder how many of these businesses actually had a full disaster recovery plan in effect. And better yet if they had a plan, have they ever exercised it with their IT department heads or leadership teams?
I’m surprised at how many businesses take disaster recovery for granted these days. If you lost your accounting software and all of your customer contacts, account numbers, service history or anything of importance, how would you rebuild your business? Would you start from scratch? Would it cause your business to close its doors for a period of time until you rebuilt, losing revenue and profits? This is a topic that we think is a very serious and mission critical topic yet so many businesses let their disaster recovery plan fall by the way side.

If you’re one of those companies that think that your managed IT services company does your backups for you and that you are safe, guess again. If your managed services IT company has never had a conversation with you about your backup strategy, document retention or offsite backups do not assume that they have you completely covered in the event of an outage. Engage them and have them put your DR plan in place and then test it. Test it quarterly to make that not only your staff knows what to do but your managed IT services company knows what to do and how to restore your network and servers quickly in the event of an outage.

Disaster can strike at any time. While you’re sitting at lunch on perfectly beautiful day as was the case several days again here in Virginia, or with more advanced warning like Hurricane Irene which is barreling towards the east coast as I write this blog post. Don’t wait until after the disaster happens to decide on how to protect your data. Be proactive and have a system in place. I’ve always liked the saying of “Failure to plan is planning to fail…”

Contact Alexandria Networks at http://www.alexandrianetworks.com today for more information on how to build a solid DR plan for your association or business.  As your local Barracuda Networks partner, we can help build a strategy that covers both onsite and offsite backups to help your business to continue in the event of a disaster.