VERITAS educates the market on disaster recovery

As part of a global campaign to raise awareness of how critical disaster recovery preparedness is to business survival, VERITAS Software has scheduled a series of free, one-day seminars on the subject for next month.

"Use of the term disaster is in some ways a misnomer because the mental imagery conjured up by the word is typically of something approaching national proportion - or at least regional dimensions. It usually conjures up images of natural phenomena such as earthquakes, fires, floods, tornadoes, or, more common locally, lightning strikes," says Nick van Noordwyk, regional director: Middle East and Africa at VERITAS Software.

"However, when used in a business sense, the term disaster can be applied to any event that has potential to disrupt a company`s cash flow. Something as elementary as a virus or power failure could cause untold damage by interrupting employee access to the computer systems they need to perform their jobs effectively," he adds.

Research reveals that one out of every five organisation that experience a disaster go out of business within five years. Further, those that do manage to survive end up encountering colossal, and business-threatening, financial difficulties in the aftermath.

"But it doesn`t have to be this way," says Van Noordwyk. "If companies put contingency plans into place, they can protect themselves, their customers and their balance sheet from the debilitating effects of system unavailability."

In order to help local companies get to grips with these issues and, indeed, develop strategies to protect their livelihood, VERITAS has teamed up with a group of other vendors, including Compaq, Dell, Microsoft and Sun Microsystems, to offer insight into the complexities of effective disaster recovery planning.

Planned for Cape Town on 25 February and Johannesburg on 27 February, the seminars will feature a number of industry gurus covering topics that include:

* Evaluating the cost and extent of a disaster and planning for [business] survival;

* Building a solid cost-effective strategy to ensure business continuance;

* Creating a data safety net;

* Reducing the time it takes, and cost, to recover from disaster; and

* Surviving a data centre-wide business disaster.

The Seminar Series has been developed specifically for IT professionals, channel partners and business decision-makers in the region, providing the information they need to avoid the negative impacts of any disaster, enabling them to continue business without interruption, 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

For more information, or to register, go to http://www.veritas.com/sa/events/drroadshow or e-mail jolene@travelog.co.za on or before Friday, 15 February 2002.