When you lose critical data, every minute that goes by means lost opportunities, missing revenue, and perhaps even the closing of a successful business. Whether the cause of the data loss is a disk crash, power outage, a virus, or even accidental deletion, gigabytes of files and weeks, or even months, of work are in jeopardy.

The key to ensuring ongoing survival in the face of data loss is a business continuity plan-a formal strategy for coping with a catastrophic loss of information and preventing such a loss from happening in the first place. Such a plan documents which areas in your company depend on electronic data, what steps are necessary to survive without them, and what resources are available to help recover lost or damaged systems. Time is of the essence: a recent report by The Gartner Group says companies will need to reduce the time it takes to recover critical processes and application systems to 24 hours by 2003. Noncritical systems, they add, will need to be back up and running in four days.

Your continuity plan should go beyond simply saying you’ll back up your hard drive. Effective data backup is becoming increasingly difficult as companies become less centralized, adopt hardware running a variety of operating systems, have more remote computer users, and depend more heavily on information. You may have to back up not just mainframe systems and applications, but also data from workstations, notebooks, PC LANs, and application servers. And you’ll want to do it quickly, to reduce the downtime while data is being backed up, as well as the amount of time it takes to recover from a system failure.

Continuity planning should include development of strategies capable of meeting quick fix, partial replacement, full redundancy or replacement, and possible outsourcing. Start by identifying your company’s existing arrangements and practices in the event of a system failure. What parts of your operation would be affected most by a loss of data, and what would the impact be? And what steps are required to improve your existing plan?

The information in a continuity plan must be kept alive. Organizations are constantly changing-businesses are acquired, merged, and divested; new operations and processes begin, some cease; people leave, are hired, or are promoted; customer commitments and supplier relationships change; locations change; responsibilities change; market priorities change. You cannot rely on outdated information.

Continuity planning not only provides a clear and comprehensive statement of actions to be taken before, during, and after a disaster, it also offers comfort in knowing that if a catastrophe occurs, it won’t result in complete financial disaster. Ensuring that mission critical operations continue on a day-to-day basis is the only real way of nailing down your organization’s ability to conduct business as usual. Without a business continuity plan, you will have no path to follow in the maelstrom of confusion which follows a data loss disaster. With such a plan in place, life-and the business of doing business-will go on as usual.