How To Protect Yourself Against Natural DisasterHow To Protect Yourself Against Natural Disaster

Email is the other priority. For short-term outages you can subscribe to a service that will store your email for you and then retransmit it when your mail servers come back online. If you do not maintain such a service, you could lose a lot of critical email and business because the sending mail servers will delete mail they cannot send, and mail that goes undelivered will be lost forever.

Business associates may also delete you as a customer if they don’t hear back from you. Despite all the news about the hurricanes of 2005, it’s astonishing that the first reaction to a bounced email is to assume the recipient does not want to hear from you, or that the company went out of business for reasons other than acts of God. Few senders stop for a minute to consider that perhaps the recipient’s city does not exist any more.

If you have your own Exchange server at the office, relocate it to a DR center along with a DC. The two servers will allow you to house critical data, email and all domain operations out of the path of a destructive storm.

A stormy 2006 season is only six months away. If the trend continues, there is a very high probability that a storm or other natural disaster can take you offline again for a long period of time. Have a generator on standby and enough gas for a few days if you sustain a glancing blow. But get a DC into a data center -- and even a single 1U server is better than none -- to be sure that the cyber-existence of your business survives the next outbreak of nature.

Server Pipeline columnist Jeffrey R. Shapiro is the co-author of Windows Server 2003 Bible (Wiley) and is an infrastructure architect who manages a large Windows Server network for an insurance firm.