We have all heard the horror stories of simple mistakes that lead to costly business disasters. It seems like every day on the news we hear about the next recall or outage that leads to the need for public relations to clean up the mess. More often than not, the damage is too great to overcome and that company which suffered the IT disaster is unable to recover. Planning for the unknown and unlikely can be difficult but having enough funds to implement an IT disaster recovery plan can seem close to impossible. Often companies are faced with more pressing issues to their business than something that may or may not happen, or so they think, which is why we hear about these stories on the news quite frequently. But how unlikely is it that an IT disaster could happen to your company? With the combination of natural disasters, hardware failures and human error, the reality is that data loss is only a matter of when, not if. According to a NFIB National Small Business Poll, man-made disasters affect 10% of all small businesses and a staggering 30% have been impacted by natural disasters. A simple power outage could put your whole business at risk. In fact, research by the University of Texas has shown that only 6 percent of companies suffering from a catastrophic data loss survive, 43 percent never reopen and 51 percent close within 2 years.