Imagine you arrive to work tomorrow and all of your computers are gone. All the hardware and all the backups. OK, maybe that’s not too likely, after all you do have security and alarms at your facility, but what if you arrive at work and there’s been an accident ─ a truck carrying hazardous materials has spilled its contents on your street and you can’t get into your building. Or what if you find you'll be without power for days, or, in the case of other disasters, for weeks. Can your business survive without its computers and its data for this length of time?

Seriously, think about this for a minute. Do you have a plan in place to deal with this scenario? When did you last update it? When did you last verify that all the elements were in place and worked?

If you haven’t thought about this much, ask your employees to put together the key applications necessary every day to run your business. Email is probably one of them. If you stop answering email from your customers, what will happen? If you can’t answer phone calls, email would allow you to at least notify customers and keep in contact.

After you understand what applications are essential to run your business, value them in terms of importance and cost/risk if you lose them. The key is not the expense, but the risk you are willing to take. As a CEO you should be asking your staff, your CIO or IT Manager, or whoever you look to for IT support, some serious questions, like "What would we do if….?" It will likely be up to you as to what you are willing to spend, but the risk is real and should be evaluated.

That’s a starting point for building a disaster recovery (DR) plan. Most large companies have multiple offices and can shift the burden from one to another, but even that requires a plan. They probably also have duplicate computer/server/co-location installations. If you are a mid-size company, you may not have this luxury. However, even a small company can build a simple DR plan, even if it consists of backup tapes being taken home once a week.