DISASTER RECOVERY: Crucial For Business Continuity

Increasing competition in PC business has lowered margins to such levels that
attending two after-sales support calls wipes out all the profits made during
the sale. 70% of these support calls are issues relating to operating system
crash, data loss or application errors. And these problems occur mostly due to
lack of awareness, user negligence and sometimes due to unknown causes.

Increasing dependence of users on the computing resources has made down time
in any organization of any size, a lot costlier than what it used to be.
Well-designed software tools are a must to diagnose and repair problems in order
to reduce downtime. By avoiding the time-consuming operations of backup and
recovery, the right data recovery tools can get systems up and running with a
minimal amount of time and effort.

RELIABLE RECOVERY

When problems occur, it is important for recovery operations to be reliable
and accurate. They should be performed so as to minimize any new errors that may
be introduced in the repair process. Even if the person performing the repair
has a full understanding of the purpose, function and configuration of the
machine, it will take considerable time to restore all of the required system
settings.

It is also likely that at least some of the many required settings will be
overlooked. Configuration errors that aren't detected immediately (for
example, incorrect security settings) might go unsolved for a long time.

REDUCING DOWNTIME

Having a data recovery tool within the organization can greatly reduce
downtime costs in a number of ways. It reduces IT personnel costs, controls
backup expenses, lowers total cost of ownership and gives quick ROI. Reduced
downtime would mean a significant cost saving for both the IT department and the
organization as a whole.

EASE OF USE

The availability of data and system recovery tools can provide many
advantages to IT staff at all levels. Help Desk personnel can take advantage of
products to fix hard disk partition table problems or unbootable systems.
Systems administrators can use recovery tools to quickly restore a failed system
to operational status while minimizing the amount of manual effort required. IT
managers can rely on the right recovery tools to ensure that they can recover
failed systems or corrupted storage resources should the need arise. And, all
members of an organization will value reduced down time and quicker, more
accurate resolution of common problems.

DR! IT'S WORTH

All the computer vendors and maintenance companies should go for business
continuity solutions for their clients, which includes data loss prevention,
automated data backup and O/S application restoration. This will help them in
providing quicker solutions with complete data protection. Post-crash, data
recovery software and services cannot retrieve 100% data most of the time and
the machine downtime is also higher.

ALOK GUPTA is MD of
Unistal Systems.