Do You Know How Safe Your Data Is?

The overwhelming need to restore business communications when disaster strikes are critical for a quick recovery. Customers and investors must be reassured. Vendors and suppliers must be notified of what to do with pending shipments and supplies. Competitors may be ready to swoop down and take your business at a sign of weakness. The key is to continue your business as usual once the crises is over. Your business communication recovery needs to include restoring the business IT infrastructure.

Business continuity encompasses steps a business should take to prepare, prevent and recover from acts of nature and violence. A disaster recovery plan is one component of the business continuity plan that addresses the IT and communications infrastructure, outlining the steps necessary to recover or rebuild critical data, hardware, software, devices and more so a company's network is up and running as quickly as possible. Once IT is functioning again, the company can resume business activity, even if the building that originally housed it is gone.

Businesses implement IT disaster recovery plans of all sizes and kinds. Backing up IT servers is certainly one critical step, as is storing those tapes off-site. Employees using their own PCs and laptops must also be vigilant about data backup and again have off-site storage. In industries that are so data sensitive and real-time sensitive, like the financial industry, businesses are looking to protect their data in different geographical data centers, often situating the centers on different power grids. Products like customer-redirection reroute calls to a secondary location are critical should the primary office location become incapacitated. Using a backup phone service can also protect your lines of communication, if the service has a truly separate system and is financially strong.

Fortunately there is Time Warner Telecom. They offer their expertise and products to allow any size company to build a strong business continuity plan, including disaster recovery of IT and communications. Time Warner Telecom provides products such as Fibre Channel Storage Transport Service which links a company's main data center with its disaster recovery site. Time Warner Telecom also offers a huge variety of products and services for small and medium size companies, including co-location sites that offer a secure, redundant environment and dedicated space for equipment and storage of infrastructure and support capabilities.

Preparing for the most likely contingency is worth the time, the effort and the money. After all, it is your business that you are protecting. To learn more about the products and services Time Warner Telecom offers business customers of all sizes, visit us at www.twtelecom.com.

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