Need to Execute on a Disaster Recovery Plan? Think AmeriVault

Putting a disaster recovery plan in place is a task that every company pays lip service to but when push comes to shove, how many companies - regardless of their size - actually take the initiative and follow the plan all the way through? The answer is far too few. Whether it is an unspoken belief that a disaster will never really happen or the costs are simply too high, most companies find it nearly impossible to move their DR plan beyond the discussion stage.

In recent blog entries I've discussed the advantages of AmeriVault's new ReStartIT-VDR service and how easily it allows companies to execute on their plans to put a DR plan in place. So the question is why aren't companies moving faster? Most likely because companies have failed to take a hard look at their current tape based backup environment and come to grips that they have no assurance whatsoever that they can recover their business applications using tape.

I am not anti-tape but business recovery requirements have fundamentally changed. Despite this fact, companies persist in using tape when the recovery requirements of today's business applications are not hours, days or weeks but seconds, minutes or at most hours. These requirements completely obliterate whatever rationale companies might have for wanting to stick with tape as their primary means of recovery but still they do so.

This does not even take into account all of the headaches associated with managing the tape media itself. Tape media breaks and wears down, the tape cartridge and tape drive format may be incompatible, tape rotation is difficult to manage and tapes can be lost or difficult to find. Then add in intangibles like documentation, expertise and like systems at a secondary site in order to recover the data. The irony is that the entire premise of using tape as a foundation for disaster recovery is based on a lie and the sooner companies realize this the sooner they can get off the tape merry-go-round and start to focus on making smart decisions about how to backup and recover their corporate data.

The beautiful thing about what AmeriVault is doing is they are making the smart decision easier for businesses to make. In essence, AmeriVault backs up and recovers your data for the same amount of money or less than you are spending now while guaranteeing it will work. From my viewpoint, you have to be crazy, stupid or looking to join the ranks of the unemployed not to listen to this message. So my recommendation is for more companies to take the blinders off and take a harder look at what AmeriVault's online backup and its accompanying ReStartIT-VDR can offer in solving one's backup and DR problems in 2008.