Improve Your Backup And Disaster Recovery In Preparation For London Olmypics, Advises Acronis

With working from home being recommended for hundreds of London's public and private sector employees Acronis offers businesses tips for better data protection

SCHAFFHAUSEN, Switzerland, June 27, 2012 - Acronis, a leading provider of disaster recovery and data protection solutions for physical, virtual and cloud environments, today released four tips to help companies improve their backup and disaster recovery in preparation for an increased mobile workforce during London 2012 Olympics.

With up to 5 million visitors planning to visit the London 2012 Olympic Games, UK workers face huge difficulties travelling to and from work, which could cost businesses millions in lost productivity. Instead, a record number of employees will be working from home. But with important company data residing on employee laptops, companies need to step up their disaster recovery and backup plans or risk losing critical data.

In light of this, Acronis has issued four tips to help businesses ensure all their employees critical data is fully protected and can be recovered quickly in the event of failed laptop, downtime, or lost and damaged PCs:

1. Those Who Plan, Prosper - Having a disaster recovery plan in place is a number one priority. However, Acronis found only 55 percent of UK companies surveyed in the 2012 Disaster Recovery Index strongly agree that they have ample procedures in place to enable comprehensive backup and disaster recovery.
2. A Hop, Skip and a Cloud Away - More and more companies are starting to use the cloud for their offsite backup and recovery needs, which presents an effective solution when mobile workers cannot complete on-premise backups. Nearly a half (49%) of all companies questioned believe the cloud saves time, offers a better service/infrastructure and improves the reliability of backups.
3. One of These Things is Not Like the Other - Recovering to dissimilar hardware is a good practice to have in place. With hardware-agnostic software, companies can easily recover data from the failed system's backup image onto any available hardware, replacing the old machine's hardware drivers in a matter of 15 minutes.
4. A Picture's Worth 1000 Words - To ensure that companies can be back up and running quickly in the event of a disaster, they should opt into disk imaging. By making images of computers, employees can ensure complete copies of their data and applications are secure and easily recoverable. In the event of a lost or damaged laptop the disk images can be loaded onto a new laptop in a few hours, as opposed to days.

David Blackman, general manager of Northern Europe and MEA: "Having a backup and disaster recovery plan in place helps companies ensure their data is protected and employees can be back up and running when something goes wrong. Our disaster recovery tips help minimise the financial and productivity impacts that occur after unplanned disruptions, so companies, both large and small, can be winners when it comes to protecting their most valuable asset, their data."