The terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 have taught many businesses one thing: prepare for the unexpected. Companies must take steps to make their businesses less dependent on a single office or data infrastructure. Consider implementing technologies that can quickly duplicate company data at a remote location. Gartner Research predicts that two out of five enterprises that experience a disaster the magnitude of the World Trade Center attack will go out of business within five years. Therefore, it is more important than ever to either build a redundant IT facility, or select an IT outsourcing service provider for disaster recovery.

Traditional implementation of Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity Planning are rather complex and extremely expensive. That is why many small to medium size companies do not have a Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity Plan in place. Fortunately, new Internet technologies are reducing the cost and complexity of implementing the Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity Plans. For a few hundred dollars a month, your mission critical data can be replicated to a secure, remote data center in real time. None of your data will be lost when a disaster hits your primary IT facility. For a few thousand dollars a month, you can mirror your mission-critical IT systems at a remote data center (a hot-site). When your primary IT facility goes down, you can switch your IT systems to the mirrored site in a few minutes or less. With Internet DNS technology, you can even make the fail over to the mirror site transparent to end-users. End users will not need to make any changes or feel any impact on their productivity when a disaster hits. Internet VPN technology makes data transfer to a remote site secure.