“A stitch in time saves nine” has never been as true as when talking about disaster recovery and business continuity planning.

Often the most overlooked aspect of a computer system is the backup and recovery plan. The value of your IT system is not its replacement cost; it is the cost of the data stored within it. Many studies have shown the total loss of an organizations data often leads to the failure of the organization; even a 48 hour outage can be catastrophic. Very few smaller businesses have any real chance of recovery in the event of the loss of the (often single) hard drive in a server or critical (accounts?) computer. Many firms have a backup drive, some even run a backup for data, very few backup everything needed to recover, virtually none test the backup or try to recover before it is too late.