Highly Available PC First Step in Business Continuity for Executives

Directing users to save data to a network drive is achievable through Local Policies and Domain Policies, but enforcing these policies is another issue. Very often Network and Systems Administrators are faced with directors, managers, executive personal and the like, who do not want such policies applied to them. These executive users may even be exempt from these policies, preventing you as the Administrator from protecting the very users that need the protection the most. These executive users are often more comfortable with their data on their local hard drive and are unwilling to save their data to the network where it can be backed up regularly. If the hard drive on their PC fails all their data is often lost or, at the very least, costly to recover. It will be your responsibility to recover this data. So how do you, as an Administrator of this network, protect these executive users from themselves and ensure that these systems stay highly available? This paper will address the availability portion of the CIA triangle as it applies to Windows XP Professional. This paper will also suggest how to make these systems highly available through the use of hardware and software, avoiding the conundrum associated with enforcing company policy on those who are exempt from it.