Looking to boost SMBs' disaster recovery preparedness, IT Business Edge contributor Paul Mah recently told his readers about Symantec's recomendations for improving their readiness for an emergency situation.

Here are the four nuggets of wisdom.

Determine your needs. It would be a grave mistake to treat all data as equally important, Mah says. While it could provide peace of mind to try to back up everything in your SMB, often there is no need to do so. Usually, simply maintaining a copy of the latest version of the installation files will be more than adequate.

Engage trusted advisers. Tapping into the expertise of specialized solution providers or trusted consultants can help get the disaster-recovery process in motion.

Automate where you can. Manual backup processes are often skipped or forgotten. If this were not true, why would Microsoft create Windows Update and the major antivirus makers schedule automated scans of your systems by default?

Test annually. While nobody ever disputes the need to back up or have a disaster-recovery plan in place, SMBs tend to skip the crucial step of actually testing backups regularly.

Here are some additional resources in the Knowledge Network that will help you in your disaster recovery/business continuity efforts:

• "IT Disaster Recovery Planning For Dummies" Excerpt
• NIST Contingency Planning Guide for IT Systems
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