Offsite Backup & Disaster Recovery

If you come into work one morning to find your office has been destroyed, would your business recover?

  • Would you lose all of your paper documents?
  • Are electronic documents that are located on different workstations now useless?
  • Have you lost valuable email messages?
  • Where are your customer, vendor and employee records?
  • What would you do?

Paper documents stored in file cabinets are susceptible to fire and flood. You cannot recover a paper document that has been destroyed by a fire or a flood. But the problem goes beyond your paper files. Electronic documents stored on hard drives on workstations and servers across your operation are equally vulnerable to catastrophic loss. Nobody wants to think they might need to implement a disaster recovery plan, but proper planning could enable your company to survive a disaster.

By definition, Electronic Document Management System (EDMS) is software that controls and organizes documents. This involves scanning paper documents, filing them accordingly, and making them available to view across your business. In addition to paper documents, electronic documents and emails can also be stored in the EDMS. An EDMS will provide consolidation of all important documents within an organization regardless of the type of document. This consolidation creates a centralized electronic repository that not only improves operational efficiency, but also makes it possible to create and implement a successful disaster recovery plan.

In the event of a disaster, the goal is to be able to quickly procure a temporary office, install computer systems and restore all required documents and information to enable a business to function. The biggest differentiator between a backup plan and a disaster recovery plan is maintaining a copy of your critical documents in an off‐site location. One can accomplish this by following the steps listed below:

  • Consolidate documents of all types into an EDMS
  • Create a backup strategy
  • Implement your backup processes
  • Test your restore capabilities
  • Ensure your backup medium is stored at an off‐site location