When disaster strikes, you can either sit and watch all your hard work go up in flames or you can do something about it. Fortunately, managed services providers have made the latter a much simpler option by consulting on effective disaster recovery plan.
According to Nationwide’s annual survey, 25% of small- and medium-sized businesses never reopen after being impacted by a major disaster. Given the requirements that today’s businesses face, managed backup services are very much in tune with what the current business environment requires, which means you don’t have to be part of this statistic.
But before you deploy any recovery plan, consider these critical points:
Identify your critical assets
Applications, operating systems, software, and data are critical to your business’s lifeblood and should be prioritised for recovery. Recovering all your IT assets is ideal, but the cost and time considerations make this challenging.
Performing a thorough inventory of your tech assets may not seem like a very productive use of time, but it will eventually prove useful in the wake of a catastrophe. When you perform regular inventory, you can determine which assets are worth saving and which ones are not.
Your company and staff can continue to function without access to email, but if you run an e-commerce company, it would be difficult to continue operations — and make profits — if the servers that run your payment channels are down. Great decision-making skills wouldn’t be out of place in this scenario and would help expedite the resumption of normal operations.
Make the most out of cloud technology
The cloud has done wonders for businesses’ work efficiency and budgeting strategies, and what it does for disaster recovery is just as impressive. Aside from faster recovery times, a cloud-based disaster recovery plan keeps your assets out of harm’s reach by putting your data in a virtual environment that can be retrieved from anywhere with an internet connection. Also, you won’t be left to get things running on your own as cloud tech experts are expected to help with your systems’ recovery.
Examine the technical aspects
Don’t forget to assess your bandwidth usage and requirements with respect to your recovery plan, verifying compatibility between databases and backup networks, and keeping your systems’ software up-to-date. Why? So you can avoid gaps between what was backed up and what can be retrieved during the actual recovery process. In the event of a calamity, good judgment should supersede mere awareness.
Determine restoration timelines
As you design a disaster plan, focus on including a timeline for recovery and determine objectives to help you reach that goal. Come up with a reasonable timeframe for how long your company can last an outage while backups are restored and how long it would take before you could provide your clients with a definite date to resume operations.
Data, servers, and entire computer systems have varying levels of importance. When you have a clear idea of which elements of your IT infrastructure need prioritisation, you’ll be more prepared.
Deploy a plan that works
According to a study, 58% of companies faced issues despite having disaster recovery plans in place. This was a result of several factors, but in most instances, the company’s’ disaster recovery plan wasn’t implemented effectively or IT departments failed to test the plan.
No business looks forward to the day their hard work falls into shambles. If you’re going to implement a disaster recovery plan, it has to be one that not only works, but works well. You don’t want to wait for an actual disaster to occur before you determine whether or not your recovery plan can save you.
Whilst having a disaster strategy provides massive relief, by no means is it foolproof. Austin Technology has dealt with a variety of disaster recovery scenarios for clients belonging to different industries. Talk to us today if you want to be prepared against any failure.
