Every small and home-based business owner should resolve to implement a workable disaster recovery plan to divert looming IT failure and potentially permanent data loss. With some simple advance planning, it’s possible to avoid mistakes that can lead to data collapse and stop businesses in their tracks.

How can your company prepare its IT infrastructure? “Since disaster recovery and data protection strategies are an absolute necessity, a little forethought and planning can go a long way.” Dave Sobel, CEO of Fairfax, Virginia-based Evolve Technologies (www.evolvetech.com), explains, “Any inability to access email, corporate file shares or needed applications results in lost productivity, which ultimately affects the bottom line. Every company that has experienced an IT disaster knows that a simple disaster recovery plan is worth its weight in gold.”

Plan IT: No plan is not a good plan! Many businesses that experience data loss are unprepared for the aftermath. Hardware or a system failure can happen at any time – and data can be lost as a result.

Unless a back-up system is in place, this data is likely lost forever. Know that it’s possible for companies to easily bounce back from every disaster except data loss. Any infrastructure can be put back together – and it’s possible to recreate user email accounts, entire workstations, and even servers. However, data can’t be recreated if it is lost – unless a back-up system is in place. Imagine trying to remember all the emails currently in your own inbox and trying to recreate each email one by one! It’s an impossible task.

Price IT: Disaster recovery planning is one area where it doesn’t pay to be cheap. Spending money now to ensure that data is protected later will ultimately save enormous amounts of money and time in the future. File reconstruction is just one aspect of recovery. Every business also must determine precisely what data have been lost, which can be a major undertaking in itself. Recreating files – rather than working on new business – can be detrimental.

Smart business executives invest in comprehensive backup and disaster recovery solutions. For those small businesses that lack an in-house IT department, consulting with a professional IT company to develop a plan is a wise investment. A good system ensures that servers are protected against critical data loss, while expediting data recovery in the event of server failure

Protect IT: A Network Attached Storage Device (NAS) can provide this protection, supplying fast virtualization capabilities, so that in a disaster when an entire office is lost, a new NAS can be imaged for use as a virtual server with the most current backup information intact. This little piece of hardware offers priceless peace of mind for small business owners.

Another smart component to a disaster recovery plan is a practical offsite backup solution. This allows complete data restorations for workstations, servers or NAS devices, ensuring that the operating system, applications and data of any machine remain unharmed. Small businesses can even upload their data via a secure Internet connection so that data is securely stored out of the office in a remote data center. In the event of a disaster at work, data remains safe.

It is essential for backups to not only run, but to also undergo regular testing. A best practice is to simulate a disaster periodically and perform a test restore to ensure that all data is available.

How prepared is your company for potential data loss? Implement that disaster recovery plan now, before it’s too late! For more details, go to www.evolvetech.com.