Forty percent of businesses affected by a natural or man-made disaster never emerge on the other side, according to the Insurance Information Institute.  It's believable and almost surprising the number's not higher when you consider that nearly two-thirds of today's small businesses don't even have an emergency plan in place.

FEMA administrator Craig Fugate has stated: "Putting a disaster plan in motion now will improve the likelihood that businesses...will not only survive and recover themselves, but also help their neighbors and communities recover more quickly."

FEMA and the Red Cross have joined forces to get the message out - be preemptive and develop a contingency plan before disaster strikes. At www.ready.gov/business are numerous tools and resources for small to mid-sized businesses to begin building or updating their disaster plan, including a Red Cross Ready Rating - free, interactive assessment tool. We went through the assessment ourselves, and while not all portions may apply to your business, they certainly help you to start thinking about your plan and the 'what-ifs.' The Sykora family businesses are ready - able to be up running seamlessly from multiple national locations. We'd like to help you get ready too, and invite you to review our services and visit our sister site: www.chicagobackups.com.  

A rather routine system upgrade over Memorial Day weekend turned fatal for Brigham Young University's IT department. Early in the process critical errors erupted, eventually resulting in massive data loss and hard drive failure. It's been two months since that fatal install, and IT is still scrambling to restore what it can, hoping to have systems back in place by Christmas. 

Over 30 departments were affected, primarily student and faculty research, while admin functions escaped due to quick reaction and a few precautionary steps taken by IT prior to initializing the update.  But with the lost data potentially delaying the graduation of graduate students, seems to us all data should have been treated as critical and properly backed-up prior to the update.

"When things run smoothly, we get a sense of complacency," Steve Burton, administrator of the campus Technology Education Computing Lab, told the campus paper. "A thing like this is a good reminder to be vigilant with a backup running."

Many departments used a data backup contained within the system. This single onsite solution resulted in a total loss. We can't stress it enough - off-site data backup and a disaster recovery plan is the surest way to prevent similar situations from affecting any sized business. Find your solution at www.ChicagoBackups.com.