SQL Server backups and disaster recovery

DTI Survey 1000 selected companies every year about a wide range of topics. One interesting statistic from this is that 44% have no plan for business continuity and only 14% consider they have a robust plan in place. The survey also found that the No 1 cause of business continuity failure is of course IT with 22% of those surveyed affected by this in 2006. The horsemen of the apocalypse; flood, famine, disease, war don't get a look and even fire comes in at no 24 in the list.

In response to this the British Standards Institute (BSI) have introduced a business continuity standard, BSI 25999. Part of this is a specification (BSI 25999-2) out in November which will be the basis for certification to the standard.

Major businesses are looking to adopt this standard quickly and will in turn mandate that their suppliers have this standard to ensure that their business doesn't fail because of a third party on whom they rely.

So before your organisation contributes to the worsening of these statistics, make sure you can recover from your backups be  it from SQL Server, Exchange or indeed the file system.  If you need help with this then check out Steve Lamb's presentation on Data Protection Manager at the next round of TechNet road-shows.

For general information about the standard you can also contact Julian Thrussell at BSI.

Technorati tags: disaster recovery, BSI, BSI 25999, Business Continuity