Is your business prepared for a major disaster? According to an October 2011 Forrester Research (News - Alert) Inc. report titled, “Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery,” although BCDR remains a priority it seems to have taken a backseat to other business processes such as business intelligence, virtualization and consolidation. With CIOs and CTOs facing the challenge of prioritizing IT and technology into businesses and with IT bringing a lot of versatility to the businesses they support, BCDR is arguably linked to the critical IT infrastructure and the overall success of cloud services.

Traditional backup is not enough and is ill equipped to deal with data recovery during a disaster, a recent blog post from cloud services provider NaviSite (News - Alert) revealed. Since disaster recovery is more about preparation than recovery, a BCDR strategy, even for small businesses that do not have a dedicated IT staff, becomes critical. An effective BCDR approach involves more than just replicating data offsite. After a disaster, servers need to be rebuilt, operating systems and applications reinstalled, networks configured and storage volumes reassigned. All this needs to be done as quickly as possible. Business continuity is of utmost importance during and after a disaster. A BCDR strategy also includes potential business continuity challenges such as the departure of a key team member, critical malware infections, supply chain breakdowns or catastrophic failures.

IT budget allocation has historically involved prioritizing more pressing needs. However, with more enterprises looking to invest in virtualization, infrastructure consolidation and cloud computing, BCDR in the cloud takes on a whole new approach. The BCDR paradigm has shifted to become more cost-effective and easy to manage, allowing businesses to better meet Recovery Time Objectives (RTO) and Recovery Point Objectives (RPO).

Using cloud services for storage, applications and infrastructure offers a redundant solution to meet RTO and RPO objectives for businesses with minimal expenditures. BCDR innovations have evolved to the point where virtually everything from the desktop to the data center and everything in between is covered, offering a truly end-to-end strategy.

Want to learn more about the latest in communications and technology? Then be sure to attend ITEXPO West 2012, taking place Oct. 2-5, in Austin, TX. ITEXPO (News - Alert) offers an educational program to help corporate decision makers select the right IP-based voice, video, fax and unified communications solutions to improve their operations. It's also where service providers learn how to profitably roll out the services their subscribers are clamoring for – and where resellers can learn about new growth opportunities. For more information on registering for ITEXPO click here.

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