Late one night, the call comes in. There’s been a disaster at your office building and you’d better get over there quickly! As you drive to the office, you go over a mental checklist: Is the insurance paid up? If the power is down, how will I keep the business running? Without our data, applications and servers, how will we service clients? What about employees and vendors?

You review the time you spent last year with a disaster planning consultant. She was referred to you by your service provider, who encouraged you to meet as a first step toward developing a comprehensive business continuity contingency plan.

The consultant had outlined several disaster scenarios, each with progressively more impact on our ability to continue to run our business. Her recommendations resulted what had seemed like an iron-clad service level agreement — but would it be enough for this disaster?

If you’ve been in this situation, you probably already know whether your plan was sufficient or not. If you haven’t, here are some questions asked of clients by disaster planning consultants.

1. Ensuring continuity of production data. Most businesses cannot afford to lose any of this, but if you’re not sure, ask yourself how much you could realistically rekey after a disaster. The last 24 hours? The last 4 hours?

2. Hard drive crash. How long can you afford to be down? Could the backed-up data be redirected to a new location, and how might applications be redirected to the new location?

3. Loss or destruction of a laptop, netbook, smartphone. Should the data on the lost device be encrypted to protect from fraud or intrusion? Are there any data or programs that must be backed up whenever there is a wireless connection to a network?

4. Loss or destruction of a workstation. What steps should be taken to ensure that the affected employee can continue to be productive? Is there data stored locally on that workstation that should be stored on a central server and backed up? Are there special applications associated with that workstation’s operating system?

5. Loss or destruction of a database server. How long can can the business run without a server? Assuming online backups were in place, how much data would have to be restored? And at what rate of recovery? How often should database snapshots be taken in order to minimize the time to rekey lost data? Are there ways to recreate prior keying? Should we plan for a bare-metal restore to a totally new machine?

6. Destruction or forced closure of the office. How to ensure that all electronic records are protected?? Can the essential computer systems and the most current business records be quickly recreated at an off-site data center to ensure total business continuity?

What we’re driving toward, in most cases, is a comprehensive business continuity protection based on online data backup to a sophisticated data archival and retrieval system. Computer systems are backed up almost immediately, over the internet, whenever new data is entered. Therefore, in the event of a disk crash or workstation loss, rekeying will be minimized. In the event of a total loss, the entire computer system can be quickly recreated in a virtual data center so that your business can continue to operate while you work with insurance companies and claims adjustors.

What Storage Guardian can offer

Storage Guardian and its network of managed service providers help businesses prepare for disasters. With a full suite of software tools designed for all forms of data protection and with expertise on crafting data disaster recovery solutions, any business can be prepared for all possible scenarios of computer disasters.

Our tools perform continuous data protection backups, immediate backups when wireless devices connect, database structure and content restorations, email mailbox reconstruction, unique data file backups, and support today’s virtualized environments:

— FIPS 140 NIST certification, featuring password rotation that provides the option of automatically generating and changing passwords at random for specific user accounts so unauthorized persons cannot access the account or the data.

— Built-in data de-duplication, encryption and lifecycle management to minimize bandwidth and storage needs.

— Agentless software operation that does not require any agents to be purchased or installed on the existing or newly added systems under protection.

— The software reaches out over the network to perform agentless backup of all leading physical and virtual operating systems, applications, and databases, using industry standard protocols and programming interfaces.

— Full support for 64-bit computing.

Backing up to “The Cloud”

For the ultimate peace of mind, Storage Guardian Cloud Continuity can offer a virtual business continuity data center, which gets you back into business almost immediately. When disaster strikes, your mission-critical data can be instantly populated in a virtual business continuity data center.

Storage Guardian Cloud Continuity drastically reduces the operational impact of a natural disaster by restoring a single-server backup set from high availability storage to the cloud in just minutes. Users then have full access to all applications and data while the physical server is replaced, at which time normal operations can be resumed.

With Storage Guardian Cloud Continuity service in place, a business can:

— Minimize operational downtime

— Continue business-critical activities while repairing its physical environment

— Gain access to restored data in the cloud from anywhere in the world

— Restore the data from the data repository into the cloud at LAN speed

Learn more about how we can help, and set up a disaster planning consultation: here.