Gulf SMBs Flirting with Disaster

Hurricane Katrina highlighted the greater risk small- and medium-sized businesses face compared with their larger counterparts. If you can't afford elaborate disaster recovery beforehand, your disaster recovery will be more serious afterward.

As Hurricane Katrina ripped through the heart of the central U.S. Gulf Coast it threatened every company in the area. But small- and medium-sized businesses faced a more severe threat than larger companies.

Unlike larger organizations, which usually have remote data centers storing all mission-critical data at regular intervals, smaller companies often dont have the resources, experience or foresight to set up a disaster recovery or business continuance plan until the unimaginable—in the form of a natural disaster, crippling virus, utility interruption or even an act of terrorism—strikes.

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"Although large companies sometimes have inadequate disaster recovery, we dont see much of any type of disaster recovery for data implemented for SMBs," said Mike Piltoff, senior vice president of solution marketing for Champion Solutions Group, a solution provider and managed services provider in Boca Raton, Fla.

But even if a company has nothing more than a rudimentary disaster recovery plan in place—even one that simply consists of backing up data once a week—small businesses can take some steps to ensure that their data damage in the event of a disaster is mitigated to the greatest extent possible.

For disasters such as Hurricane Katrina and others for which there is at least a day or two to prepare, companies should immediately increase the rate of backups to once daily to capture as much data as possible, even if the company isnt generally in the habit of doing full backups every day, Piltoff said. Taking tapes or auxiliary disks off site is another sensible move, he said.

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