Averting disaster: storagecraft technology corporation.

• Author: Haraldsen, Tom

Anyone who has owned or operated a computer has probably lost something--a file, a document they're working on, or perhaps a folder of photos or information. It's frustrating and personally devastating, but probably not as disastrous as when it happens to a business--and it does happen.

Nearly 99 percent of respondents to a national business survey said they had experienced some type of hardware or system failure. Only 44 percent of those respondents said they'd successfully recovered all of their data, and 53 percent reported they'd never fully recouped the financial losses incurred by that disaster. The survival rate for a business without a disaster and recovery plan for their operating systems is less than 10 percent.

StorageCraft Technology Corporation, headquartered in Draper, offers a solution. It has become one of the nation's largest providers of backup and disaster recovery for data and computer systems. Prior to the company's creation in 2003, "backup was pretty archaic," says co-founder Curt James, vice president of marketing and business development. "There was a serious gap in the industry, a lacking of disaster recovery that would allow a company to get back online as quickly as possible."

A disaster call be caused by a number of instances--hardware failure, operator error, system updates, viruses, or catastrophic events like tornadoes, earthquakes or fires. "In today's 24/7 business environment, any downtime is just too costly for a business," James says. "Chances of a business going under when they lose a server are high. That lost business opportunity can be devastating, especially to e-commerce-based businesses."

StorageCraft works primarily with small- and medium-sized businesses, generally through a reseller. Those resellers are like a...