Hurricanes aren't the only disaster you need to worry about in Florida. Every year we Floridians sit around waiting for the next big storm to hit us, and many times, when I sit with local business owners to discuss technology and disaster recovery, their minds immediately run to hurricane preparedness. Instead, we should be focusing on how to avoid the loss of critical business data from more than just hurricanes.

Catastrophes like fire, flood, theft, mechanical failure and disgruntled employees should concern you more than the next "big one" that may or may notdamage your business.

A good disaster recovery plan involves more than just backing up your information, although that is a very critical part of the process, and a great place to start. But simply putting your critical business data on a CD or USB flash drive is not a strong backup process. I could not sleep well at night knowing that the information I use to run my business on, earn money from and feed and support my family with is riding on that very unreliable medium. Once again, something is better than nothing; however, there are certainly better options available.

Remote storage is really gaining in popularity, and the costs are starting to come down with competition. One of the biggest problems with remote storage is the amount of time it takes to "push the data up" to the offsite servers. Depending on your bandwidth and amount of data, it could take days, weeks, even months to push your information offsite. Offsite replication is a great plan but should not be your only one.

There is a service that provides true business continuity. It's a combination of onsite and offsite data storage, with server virtualization in case of hardware failure, 24-7 monitoring, incremental backups as often as every 15 minutes and monthly test restores. These solutions aren't nearly as expensive as they might sound, and when you look at the value they provide, it's literal pennies on the dollar of data recreation or recovery not to mention loss of revenue and business downtime while this process takes place.

As a business owner or one trusted to maintain the company's critical data, you must look at this decision just like liability insurance or vehicle insurance. Backups are "data Insurance" and all policies are not created equally. There are plenty of great offerings available, so you will want to consult your IT service provider to make sure you have the right one for your business needs. But the key is just don't sit on the sidelines, waiting when it comes to disaster recovery. The plan must be in place from the start and then executed.