Whether a company relies heavily on database activity for critical everyday business operations or only for select requirements, the loss of data due to technological failure can have far reaching negative implications. The loss of valuable information and records can cause productivity setbacks, lost profits, lost customers and headaches for everyone involved. Aside from the obvious business challenges associated with the loss of data, legislation such as the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX) places requirements on the retention and on request production of certain types of financial data. Companies assume the risk of non-compliance if they are unable to produce information within the specified time constraint required by Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) or other information focused legislation. Database and mainframe disaster recovery is more important in today's technology dependent business world than ever before.

In the past, many businesses utilized offsite data tape storage as a crucial facet of their disaster recovery plans. Such offsite tape storage entails serious security risks by today's standards, such as the possibility of loss, theft or damage to the tapes while stored at the offsite location or in transit. In the event of a disaster, the retrieval of information from such sources can waste valuable time, require intensive reorganization by IT professionals and result in financial losses due to database unavailability and customer disappointment. Additionally, scheduled nightly backups often result in periods of several hours during which applications are unavailable to employees or customers.

In today's information technology driven market, mainframe availability and security are of utmost importance. Fortunately, the need for reliable and efficient mainframe data recovery systems has not been overlooked by innovative enterprise data availability software and service companies. Fully integrated backup and recovery utilities for IMS databases are now available to simplify, automate and expedite the process of recovery without compromising crucial database availability. Such solutions have the capability to, for example, automatically accumulate and copy records on a periodic basis for ease of future retrieval, with some utilities even providing the flexibility of reverting to certain point in time.

Many companies are already discovering the direct benefits associated with such mainframe and database recovery utilities. Eliminating the manual labor requirements and uncertainty associated with offsite tape backup, integrated backup and recovery utilities provide businesses with an easily maintained, reliable and secure means of protecting valuable business data and technology.