In today's business climate, having the right information can be a lifeline between profits and losses, maintaining pace with competition, and ensuring the viability of a company. Quite often, having access to information on a 24x7 basis is what allows your organization to achieve these objectives. In addition, all stakeholders, which range form suppliers and distributors to employees and customers, must have access to this information whenever they need it. Finally, providing this required level of information availability must be provisioned not just under normal operating conditions but even during unpredictable disruptions or catastrophic disasters. It is during these unpredictable disruptions or catastrophic disasters that businesses risk losing competitive advantage by not having taken the appropriate measures to prevent loss of information availability. In the world of IT, mitigating this risk involves pursuing a business continuity strategy, or what traditionally has been referred to as disaster recovery. Through these types of services, companies can lower their business risk and look to achieve greater information availability by having a set of services designed to keep their IT operational during unforeseen events.

Companies are faced with two closely integrated challenges. At one level they are challenged with business issues that are becoming increasingly of paramount concern. At a second level, they are challenged by infrastructure needs that must be supported to meet these business challenges.

Without a thorough plan to recover from a disaster, your organization faces risks that range from insured losses of replaceable tangibles to complete insolvency. The reality is that many organizations that experience a disaster never recover. The Gartner Group estimates that two out of five organizations that experience a disaster go out of business within five years.

Your organization requires a Disaster Recovery Plan if:

1. Your customers expect supplies and services to continue—or resume rapidly—in all situations. This means your staff needs access to historical as well as current customer data and documents, that your business processes, whether manual or automated must resume quickly, and that shipments must resume with related invoices and receipts.

2. Your shareholders expect management to maintain control through any crisis. This
means management must have access to all corporate documents including memos,
email, PC files, financial or budgetary data, business contracts, and more.

3. Your suppliers expect their revenue streams from you to continue. This means you
must have access to invoices, purchase requests, and inventory data.

4. A regulatory agency expects you to meet your requirements, regardless of circumstances, including filing forms on time with the required documentation. All of this data exists in your organization today in filing cabinets and in electronic form including spreadsheets, word processing documents, PDF files, email messages, and various other applications.