Glitches and server errors cost companies valuable time and money each year. The costs of downtime can be staggering. While a standard server is available 99% of the time, that translates into 32 hours of downtime per year. According to Dataquest, one hour of downtime for a home catalogue sales company costs an average of $90,000. In one year, downtime will cost this company $2.8 million. By increasing the availability of its information system, a company can reduce its downtime costs by more than 99%.

No matter the industry, each company depends on its information system in their day-to-day operations, and system downtime affects each company stakeholder. Downtime frustrates customers who are not served promptly. Downtime frustrates employees who are not able to do their jobs efficiently. And downtime frustrates business owners and managers who are losing revenue as a result.

Disaster recovery plans have gotten increasingly more publicity lately. Many of the corporations that were in the World Trade Center on September 11th were able to continue to do business because they had a disaster plan in place. Those who had not developed a plan were unrecoverable.

While this is certainly an extreme example, disaster strikes businesses every day. Systems fail, natural disasters happen, unexpected problems occur. Would your company know exactly what to do if a server unexpectedly crashed? Would it know how long to expect the server to be down? Would another server take over automatically? These are questions that you don't want to wait to think about until you need the answers.

However, with a reliable disaster recovery plan in place, business operations will continue as usual. And no interruptions mean no money is lost.

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