Designing Backup, Restore, and Disaster Recovery Plans for Small and Medium Businesses

Microsoft CRM makes it easy for employees to share information across teams and departments, eliminates redundant data entry, and ensures superior sales and customer service support.

Data loss can occur in any number of ways including human error, a computer virus, hardware or system failure, software corruption, theft, or a natural disaster.

Small and medium-sized businesses without dedicated information technology (IT) staff are particularly vulnerable. It is therefore extremely important to have a disaster recovery plan documented and to periodically test the plan to ensure that it meets the needs of the business.

Disaster recovery plan writing by Network Infrastructure Technologies, Inc. - should detail the customer's data assets and document how each asset is backed up and restored. It should also include policies regarding media storage, media rotation, and security, as well as procedures for natural disasters.

Data is often categorized by value and may be classified as mission-critical, organization-critical, non-critical, and end user.

We Network Infrastructure Technologies, Inc. as the Microsoft providers can give you backup and recovery tools that can assist in protecting data. The backup utility is included in the following operating systems:

• Microsoft Windows® XP - User data stored on desktop and laptop computers is not often included in centralized backup operations because of the time, cost, and IT knowledge required to support such an effort. The included backup utility provides an easy-to-use wizard that helps users back up data and system information to removable media.


• Microsoft Windows ServerT 2003 - For server-based networks, administrators often redirect a user's My Documents folder to a server to assist in protecting data. The included backup utility supports automated scripting and can be used to regularly back up server data including user and server application files.


• Microsoft Windows Small Business Server 2003 - The included backup utility is designed to protect user and system data as well as data from Microsoft Exchange Server 2003 and Microsoft SQL Server 2000. The automated wizard makes it easy for administrators to prepare for a "bare metal restore" (rebuild with new hardware).

Recognizing the need to improve the efficiency of data protection, we also using Microsoft Data Protection Server to provide customers with continuous data protection coupled with rapid and reliable data recovery. Data Protection Server will provide customers with disk-based backup to enable enhanced protection and rapid recovery of corporate data based on a series of policies that an administrator sets.

Statistics that we can share include:

• 93% of companies that lost their data center for ten days or more as a result of a disaster filed for bankruptcy within one year of the disaster. 50% of businesses that found themselves without data management for this same time period filed for bankruptcy immediately. (Source: Microsoft)


• 30% of companies report that they still do not have a disaster recovery program in place and two in three companies feel that their data backup and disaster recovery plans have significant vulnerabilities. Furthermore, only 59% of companies polled test their data backup and storage systems at least once a quarter. Conducting a regular external audit of backup and restore systems is far from a common practice - only 32% report conducting an external audit.


• At what point is the survival of your company at risk? 40% said 72 hours, 21% said 48 hours, 15% said 24 hours, 8% said 8 hours, 9% said 4 hours, 3% said 1 hour, 4% said within the hour. (Source: On track - 2001 Cost of Downtime Survey Results, 2001)


• 30% of all businesses that have a major fire go out of business within a year. 70% fail within five years. (Source: Home Office Computing Magazine)


• Computer virus attacks cost businesses an estimated $55 billion USD in damages in 2003.


• File corruption and data loss are becoming much more common, although loss of productivity continues to be the major cost associated with a virus disaster. (Source: 7th Annual ICSA Lab's Virus Prevalence Survey, March 2002)

We Network Infrastructure Technologies, Inc. as Microsoft partners can help small and medium-sized businesses address data protection iNetwork Infrastructure Technologies, Inc.iatives cost effectively.