Disaster Recovery: Disaster recovery is similiar to data management but is specific to recovering data after the disaster. 9/11 and hurricane Katrina are two national disasters that tested the disaster recovery abilities of corporations and homes. Much data was lost especially in the residential market segment. I expect to see a trend in data backup/recovery residential services.

There are many stories of success and failure from these events. One success story came from New Orleans during hurricane Katrina. The CFO rescued the backup tapes just hours before the hurricane made land. This allowed us to recover the firm's accounting (Great Plains) data. The rest of the story is this; it took two companies about two weeks before the client was up and running accounting functions in Great Plains. Why did it take two weeks? Because they were running an outdated version of Microsoft Great Plains and 'nobody' had a copy of the old version. Great Plains requires the old version to be up and running and then an upgrade install is performed. Little things, like running current database applications and storing offsite duplicates of the installation media should factor into your firm's disaster recovery plans.

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