Written by Many businesses risk grave losses due to failures and disasters yet continue to depend on un-validated tape backups should they need to recover from a major outage. Implementing a disaster recovery plan can be time consuming and daunting; to the point which many simply put it off.
Through some basic steps, businesses can better protect themselves against catastrophic data loss, these steps include:
• Why do I need a Disaster Recovery (DR) plan?
• Defining and planning
• Implementation
• Testing
Fire, flood, human error, hardware failure and malicious acts can all cause a small business to at best suffer financial losses, at worst and is far too often the case, shut down for good, every business is susceptible to some king of outage, the need to plan for a disaster is real and needs to be carried out.
One of the most important aspects of a disaster recovery program is to ascertain what are the critical elements of your business. This will vary from business to business so for some it could be to ensure that data subject to long term availability due to legislation is always protected and for others it could be that the value of the business is held in the company CRM database. Whatever the case make sure your DR plan encompasses your most valuable assets at the very least.
Your plan should enable you to bring your business back online as rapidly as possible. Down time is very costly and without putting to fine a point on it the more employees you have the worse a few hours of loss production will be when you take into account the economies of scale.
Remote data backup is a useful tool to have in your disaster recovery portfolio. Many companies will have data and tape back up data stored on company premises. In the event of a major catastrophe such as a fire all company data could be lost. Utilising offsite remote data backup ensure that data is still safe and could even be accessed from another location if required.
No two companies are the same; it pays to plan your implementation. A documented project plan can help with your disaster recovery procedures, A project plan allows it to be broken down into more manageable chunks. With proper planning you can avoid some of the pitfalls and ensure nothing in left unaccounted for and will prevent having to go back.
And last but not least test test test! Sadly numerous stories abound of companies that have set up a DR plan of sorts then simply assumed it would work. You need to ensure your plan is robust and tested on a regular basis to ensure key personnel are practiced in its implementation.
Disaster Recovery planning and remote data backup protocols should be in place for every business that has critical business data and systems. Don’t wait until it is to late and disaster has already struck.