Every church should resolve to implement a workable disaster recovery plan to divert looming IT failure and potentially permanent data loss. With some simple advance planning, it's possible to avoid mistakes that can lead to data collapse and stop operations in their tracks.

How can your church prepare its IT infrastructure? Since disaster recovery and data protection strategies are an absolute necessity, a little forethought and planning can go a long way. Any inability to access e-mail, file shares, or needed applications results in lost productivity, which ultimately affects the bottom line. Every church that has experienced an IT disaster knows that a simple disaster recovery plan is worth its weight in gold.

Plan IT
No plan is not a good plan! Many churches that experience data loss are unprepared for the aftermath. Hardware or a system failure can happen at any time – and data can be lost as a result.

Unless a backup system is in place, this data is likely lost forever. Know that it's possible for organizations to easily bounce back from every disaster except data loss. Any infrastructure can be put back together – and it's possible to recreate user e-mail accounts, entire workstations, and even servers. However, data can't be recreated if it is lost – unless a backup system is in place. Imagine trying to remember all the e-mails currently in your own Inbox and trying to recreate each e-mail one by one. It's an impossible task.

Price IT
Disaster recovery planning is one area where it doesn't pay to be cheap. Spending money now to ensure that data is protected later will ultimately save enormous amounts of money and time in the future.

File reconstruction is just one aspect of recovery. Every ministry also must determine precisely what data has been lost, which can be a major undertaking in itself. Recreating files – rather than working on new business – can be detrimental.

Smart church leaders and office managers invest in comprehensive backup and disaster recovery solutions. For those organizations that lack an in-house IT department, consulting with a professional IT company to develop a plan is a wise investment. A good system ensures that servers are protected against critical data loss, while expediting data recovery in the event of server failure.

Protect IT
A Network Attached Storage Device (NAS) can provide this protection, supplying fast virtualization capabilities, so that in a disaster when an entire office is lost, a new NAS can be imaged for use as a virtual server with the most current backup information intact. This little piece of hardware offers priceless peace of mind for churches of all size.

Another smart component to a disaster recovery plan is a practical offsite backup solution. This allows complete data restorations for workstations, servers, or NAS devices, ensuring that the operating system, applications, and data of any machine remain unharmed. Churches can even upload their data via a secure Internet connection so that data is securely stored out of the physical facility in a remote data center. In the event of a disaster at work, data remains safe.

It is essential for backups to not only run, but to also undergo regular testing. A best practice is to simulate a disaster periodically and perform a test restore to ensure that all data is available.

In addition, data management tools should leverage the latest technologies that allow for recovery to any hardware, including restoration into a virtualized environment. The use of virtualization in concert with backup and disaster recovery solutions provides companies with complete coverage. Virtualization separates the hardware and the software, which are typically bound together. In a conventional backup scenario, backups attach to the physical hardware they protect. By adding virtualization to a solution, backups can be leveraged to any physical (or non-physical) hardware, providing a much more flexible and comprehensive solution.

So, how prepared is your ministry for potential data loss? Implement that disaster recovery plan now, before it's too late!

Dave Sobel is the chief executive officer of Evolve Technologies, www.evolvetech.com