Disaster Can Strike Anytime, Anywhere

Nobody can predict when and where disaster strikes. All one can do is take
adequate precautions so as to minimize the damage. Simple enough lesson, but
sadly, hardly anybody remembers that.

A case in point is my esteemed colleague who has met with disaster twice in
the last six months. Ideally speaking, he should have been on his guard after
the first disaster itself. But no, he again met with another disaster, though of
a different kind.

In the first disaster, the hard disk of his notebook crashed one fine day.
Despite giving the hard disk to all the leading data recovery experts in Delhi,
not a single data could be salvaged as the disk had physical damages. The sad
part is that he had not kept any backup of the data.

So, he went about reconstructing the entire data from scratch. In a period of
six months, he had almost finished with the project when the second disaster
struck. This time somebody stole his laptop from his car. And no points for
getting it right-but yes-he again had forgotten the basic principle of
taking backups. His entire six months' hard work of data reconstruction went
down the drain.

The sole purpose of highlighting this example is to stress on the importance
of disaster and subsequently that of recovery. As the old saying goes, those who
forget history are condemned to repeat it.

Disaster will never give an advance warning before striking. It will strike
anytime. So, be prepared by taking backups regularly. Because, the machine which
you are using is not so important as it can be easily replaced by spending some
money. But the data which you lose, can certainly not be replaced with all the
money in this world.

Although there is some welcome realization amongst corporates with regard to
disaster and subsequent recovery, amongst the channel, this concept is
practically non-existent. They have never bothered to even think about it,
forget doing something. And because of this very thinking, they have not looked
at selling solutions related to backups.

Today, the single biggest driver, which is driving the storage market
heavily, is disaster recovery. Almost all enterprise storage

solution providers are betting big on disaster recovery.

And they have every reason to do so as most corporates are data-driven. The
ever increasing implementation of applications like datawarehousing, ERP, CRM,
SCM etc by corporates is fueling the need for disaster recovery solutions.

Solution providers in the country should look hard at this trend and brace
themselves to be in a position to offer these critical solutions to corporates.

Asim Raina