Small, medium, and large businesses are all rethinking their disaster recovery strategies in the wake of severe weather, wildfires and other unpredictable events that can disrupt business communications.

Many companies have focused on disaster recovery for their data. Yet, in the disaster surrounding New Orleans, it was the inability to communicate that hampered rescue efforts, disabled companies and cost lives, rather than whether people get to their computer applications or data.

To build a voice disaster recovery plan, you need to follow four simple steps:
1) Identify your communication risks
2) Create a plan to address the communication risks
3) Test the plan
4) Maintain the plan
Now that sounds simple, but in fact, it does take effort to properly plan and execute a disaster recovery plan of any kind. Knowledge is power. Tools that help sift through the vast amount of information available to us today are even better. Following are some tools to help your business create a disaster recovery plan:

Planning

A professional consultant can assist you with creating a complete disaster recovery plan. We know that disaster recovery may not be in the budget or in the forefront of your business’ needs. That is why we recommend that you start with the Building a Comprehensive Disaster Recovery Plan Kit. (Call us at 888-776-7777 to receive your free copy.) This tutorial takes the place of the expensive consultant and puts you in control of working on your disaster recovery on your schedule and within a reasonable budget.

Because so many disaster recovery plans focus on protecting data and neglect protecting the voice communications, we also recommend that you review and use the Voice Disaster Recovery Planning Guide. (Call us at 888-776-7777 to receive your free copy) as a supplement to any complete disaster recovery plan. This gives you a quick visual look at communication options for voice disaster recovery. The services discussed in this guide are available from King Communications.

Execution

A voice disaster recovery plan is more than just forwarding a phone to a cell phone or taking a voicemail. A comprehensive plan identifies the business risks, the communication needs and helps create a system that includes all of the business logic and tools necessary to maintain critical communications in the event of a disaster.

On-Going Information

Keep up-to-date on the world of communications with specific information relevant to your business from www.kingcommunications.com and industry news from the free Voice and Data Convergence weekly report from www.itbusines sedge.com.

For more information about voice disaster recovery solutions for your business, call King Communications at 888-776-7777 for more information or visit our web site at www.kingcommunications.com .

Following a World Health Organization report and projections issued in December by the US Congressional Budget Office, Gartner Group analyst Ken McGee recently recommended that enterprises should use the next year to prepare for a possible pandemic of avian influenza.

Citing World Health Organization (WHO) claims that a pandemic is "almost certain," Gartner analyst Ken McGee recommended that, “Enterprises should take the widespread agreement on the strong likelihood of a pandemic -- and the U.S. Congressional Budget Office (CBO) projections of the devastating economic consequences of such a pandemic -- as a signal to take immediate action."

In his recommendations, McGee recommended that enterprises have plans and processes in place to allow large numbers of employees to work from home for extended periods; ensure that communication can be maintained to suppliers, partners, and customers; and provide for backup communications in the event that conventional phone, wireless, DSL, and cable are overloaded.

The CBO report included projections on the likely economic impact of a pandemic on the United States, and concluded that in a "mild" scenario, 100,000 Americans would die and the gross domestic product (GDP) would drop 1.5 percent. To read the entire CBO report, click here .

The Cyber Security Industry Alliance (CSIA), a group that includes security software firms such as Symantec, McAfee, RSA Security, Check Point, and Internet Security Systems, released a report in December criticizing the government's progress in keeping the U.S. safe from cyber attacks.

The federal government received low marks in securing the nation's information infrastructure, with most of the blame falling at the feet of the Department of Homeland Security. The poor performance was reflected in the CSIA's report card on the twelve items from 2005 that it had recommended to the Bush administration and Congress. Seven of the twelve returned with failing grades of "D" or below, with only one "B" and four "C" grades.

Securing the country's information resources -- not just the Internet, but the power grid, financial services, health care data, and consumer data -- is the responsibility of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).

Another CSIA survey put the overall consumer confidence in the country's information infrastructure -- dubbed the Digital Confidence Index (DCI) by the association -- at a failing score of 58 out of a possible 100. The responses show that while Americans mostly believe that the nation's infrastructure is working, they're far less optimistic about how safe its components are.

According to a report from Nielsen/NetRatings issued recently, the number of search engine queries increased 15 percent in October, with the top three engines accounting for more than 80 percent of the market. Google maintained its leadership position during the five-month period, handling 2.4 billion requests, or 47.7 percent.

The biggest change was with Ask Jeeves, which increased search volume 77 percent and catapulted into the number five spot with 2.1 percent market share in August, edging out My Way Search.

Image searching was the fast growing request category in October, rising 36.6 percent to 328 million. Local, web and news searches, were up 19.2 percent, 14.2 percent and 12.7 percent, respectively.