The United States Small Business Administration calls small businesses the heart of the U.S. economy. According to research by the Office of Advocacy, small businesses create the majority of the nation's new jobs and bring innovative ideas, products, and services to the marketplace. In 2006, there were nearly 27 million such organizations.

Needless to say, small businesses differ from their enterprise counterparts in many ways, from funding to infrastructure and staffing. At the same time, they also share some common challenges, including the need to ensure business continuity even in the wake of a disaster. After all, statistics paint a grim picture: half of all businesses never reopen after experiencing a catastrophic data loss and 90 percent close within two years, according to research firm Baroudi Bloor International.

What might cause significant data loss for a small business? Anything from a natural disaster to hardware or software failure, or even a simple human error. Every minute that vital information or services are not accessible can put a ruinous strain on the bottom line of a "lean-and-mean" small business.

As a result, a growing number of today's small companies are establishing and implementing a disaster recovery strategy. With best practices in place to guard against data loss and system downtime, these organizations protect business continuity and ensure rapid recovery from system crashes and other potentially disastrous events.

Back It Up

Data drives small business, and the ability to keep it always available is critical for a business' success. To that end, organizations must regularly back up their data, using a tiered approach that saves data to disk as well as to tape for short- and long-term purposes. For quick recovery, disk is often the preferred media. For long-term storage and data archiving, tape is an effective option. Both methods play a major role in the backup strategies for many organizations.

Today's most advanced backup tools for small businesses provide continuous data protection for an organization's most valuable information, whether that data is on a Windows file server, a desktop or laptop, or a Microsoft Exchange, SQL, SharePoint, or other application server. New cutting edge tools have revolutionized data protection by eliminating backup windows and enabling small businesses to recover data in seconds. For example, while traditional approaches for backing up Exchange required a full database backup and "brick level" mailbox backups, these tools offer a full, incremental, or continuous backup of Exchange and enable restores to a granular level--including down to an individual email-from a single database backup pass.