You're CIO of a modest-sized state agency with several dozen field offices. The data on your systems is sensitive and requires good processes for integrity, protection and retention. When you analyze the situation as part of your business continuity (BC) plan, you discover your field offices are using unreliable tape-backup systems with no centralized operation at headquarters to replicate the remote data. In other words, you've discovered a major gap in your recovery and continuity plans.

"Reliability was a major problem," said Eddie Chavez, CIO of the New Mexico Administrative Office of the District Attorney (AODA), whose agency mirrors the one described above. "We had no way to ensure backups were getting done, and with what regularity -- on a daily or weekly basis."

As part of its BC planning, the AODA turned to software to back up its Microsoft Exchange and SQL data located at the agency's field offices. The product, InMage Systems' DR-Scout, automated the existing data-retention process, allowing replication to take place -- in minutes rather than days -- at two regional locations.

The AODA's needs -- and solution -- are typical of what's occurring throughout the public sector as more agencies and IT departments confront the harsh realities of putting a BC plan into place with limited resources.

John Ferraro, InMage president and CEO, said many government agencies are pressuring IT departments and CIOs to deliver faster recovery times with better services. "[Service-level agreements] have tightened considerably since 9/11," he said.

At the same time, technology costs for storage disks have dropped, while recovery times happen much faster. The result is better solutions at lower cost points, according to Ferraro. "These trends have allowed us to focus on delivering solutions, rather than products to the public sector," said Ferraro.

That's a benefit because government no longer has the people and resources to craft elaborate, internal BC solutions, often reliant on manual processes. "Software now does automatically what was a manual process just a few years ago," he said.