Neverfail Customers Offer Top Five Tips for Protecting Mission-Critical Applications From Downtime During Hurricane Season

AUSTIN, Texas, Aug. 25 /PRNewswire/ -- Neverfail®, a leading global software company specializing in affordable continuous availability and disaster recovery solutions, today revealed the top five strategies from its customers in hurricane-prone regions for protecting mission-critical applications from costly downtime. Since any type of server or application downtime can have a crippling impact on business operations, leading to customer dissatisfaction, loss of productivity, reputation damage and revenue loss, companies must prepare to take the steps necessary to ensure that mission-critical processes can continue in the event of any type of emergency or natural disaster.

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According to WeatherBug, operator of the largest weather-observing network, the 2010 hurricane season forecasts a great deal of activity. For some areas of the world, preparing for hurricanes or the threat of flood may mean emergency shutdown, and continuous availability of service can make all the difference. In most cases, once a hurricane is predicted there are about 48 hours to make preparations, making a disaster recovery plan critical.

According to Forrester's Enterprise and SMB Hardware Survey, North America and Europe, Q3 2009, 61% of North American enterprises and 64% of European enterprises say that upgrading DR capabilities is either a critical or high priority. In order to successfully secure funding for disaster recovery improvements, IT professionals must work with business owners to calculate the cost of downtime, define recovery objectives, identify the likeliest risks, and select the most cost-effective  technologies and services.(State of Enterprise Disaster Recovery Preparedness: Q3 2009, Forrester Research, Inc., November 4, 2009)

"Organizations rely on their IT systems to make critical business decisions, communicate, and process transactions, so when a disaster strikes it is often catastrophic – crippling productivity, revenue and the organization's reputation," said Andrew Barnes, senior vice president of corporate development for Neverfail. "Neverfail is dedicated to ensuring that organizations are continuously connected to their business critical applications. We turned to our Gulf Coast customers who have experienced hurricanes Katrina, Rita, Gustav and Ike to understand how they prepare for these kinds of natural disasters."

Following are the five business continuity strategies from Gulf Coast businesses to ensure continuous uptime for their mission-critical applications during hurricane season:

1. Plan for zero downtime. Make sure your disaster recovery solution provides for little to no downtime. In this 24/7 world, most organizations can't afford to have any downtime in the event of a disaster. This is especially true for organizations in fields such as government and healthcare, where any downtime can cost lives.
2. Know your organization. Make sure your solution is appropriate for your organization. While it's important to implement a disaster recovery solution, don't implement just any solution because it says "disaster recovery."
3. Make sure IT is available to everyone, everywhere – even those who are now mobile. Ensure continuous availability for your business-critical applications. Organizations that are national or global in size need to keep doing business, even in a disaster. After a disaster strikes, some of your employees will be mobile but regardless of where they are located or what applications they are using, they need to have continuous availability to critical applications, such as e-mail and business systems.
4. Think more broadly than e-mail. Make sure your disaster recovery solution covers all the applications that your team needs continuous access to for business critical decisions, not just e-mail.
5. Test, test, test. No organization would install a fire alarm system in their office and just assume that it works and their employees can evacuate safely – why would an organization implement a disaster recovery solution without testing it? Like a fire drill, test your disaster recovery plan on a regular basis. Of course, a disaster recovery solution is useless if it doesn't actually work as promised. And you shouldn't wait until a disaster to find out.

These tips are useful not only for hurricane disaster recovery, but also for floods, power outages, earthquakes, and terrorist attacks. In addition to disasters there are a variety of other everyday causes, such as computer or server malfunctions, power outages, and more, that lead to company – and often, customer – downtime.

To learn more about Neverfail's high availability and disaster recovery solutions, visit

http://www.neverfailgroup.com/solutions/disaster-recovery.html.

About Neverfail

Neverfail is a leading global software company providing affordable data protection, high availability, and disaster recovery solutions focused on keeping users productive. Neverfail's software solutions enable users to remain continuously connected to the live software application irrespective of hardware, software, operating system, or network failures. Neverfail's mission of eliminating application downtime for the end user delivers the assurance of business continuity, removes the commercial and IT management costs associated with system downtime, and enables the more productive use of IT resources. Neverfail, a US Managed Microsoft Gold Certified Partner, is a consistent and active early adopter participant and contributor in all mission-critical Microsoft applications. It is also a member of the Microsoft SQL Server Always On Alliance. More information can be found at www.neverfailgroup.com.

Neverfail is a trademark of Neverfail Group Limited. All other trademarks, including Microsoft, Windows, and Exchange, are trademarks of their respective companies. Copyright © 2009 Neverfail Group Ltd. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, transmitted, transcribed, or translated into any language or computer language, in any form or by any means without prior express, written consent of Neverfail Group Limited.

SOURCE Neverfail