The international market never sleeps. A small incident anywhere can trigger events that affect the whole world. An earthquake in Taiwan on Boxing Day 2006 damaged two undersea cables and immediately telecommunications and internet traffic in East Asia were disrupted. Whether it is a threat or an opportunity, your business needs to be on the lookout so that decisive, effective action can be taken.

Think about how much of your business resides within and depends on your computer system. What happens if it goes down? It would be disastrous! Your business ability gets disrupted immediately. You will be unable to respond or take advantage of opportunities. Everything from your productivity, revenue stream, customer retention and goodwill and opportunities and even the very viability of your whole business would come under threat. Business continuity goes out of the window.

Worse still, what if the data within your computer system itself gets damaged? Hardware is expensive but replaceable. Data loss, however, spells disaster.

Data loss could arise because of a hardware failure, such as a hard disk head crash. Human error could make you lose data – a fast powerful computer also means that damage is done quicker and deeper.

A surge or fall in your power supply could damage your computer. So could lightning. Computer equipments are sensitive to moisture so water damage caused by building defects or worse still, floods can wreck your system. Intense heat like that from a fire or even smoke would seriously compromise any setup.