All Electronics Corporation

For many businesses, disaster recovery planning is based on hypothetical worst-case scenarios. However, for All Electronics, the scenario was all too real. The company's vice president, Woolf Kanter recalled, "A few years ago lightning struck our building, destroying our D3 server. We made a business decision at that time to attempt data recovery from the server's disk drive rather than to restore from the previous night's backup tape. This decision resulted in our losing a day of work as well as requiring every staff member to recreate everything they did that day, including credit card transactions and more...a major headache." Kanter continued, "The data recovery was successful, but very expensive and time-consuming. We lost our system on a Thursday but weren’t live again until the weekend."

To guard against failure and disruption of mission-critical business applications and inventory data, All Electronics began the process of replacing its servers and installing backup recovery software on the company's main system.