IT Disaster Recovery
Disaster can strike any business without warning. And what is frightening is that more than 50% of companies will not survive a major disaster. It is critical to evaluate your IT infrastructure, and understand what data security measures you can put in place to facilitate damage control and quickly restore operations.
How to Build Your Disaster Recovery Plan
Make a risk assessment
Before conducting a risk assessment, you should obtain an inventory of your assets.
Define objection
The next step in the process is to classify your data and applications according to their criticality.
Document and announce your plan
This is also very important, especially in a disaster scenario.
Apply the backup rule 3-2-1
This rule is the guiding principle for backup data and disaster recovery time.
Why Is Disaster Recovery Significant?
Disasters can cause many types of damage with varying severity, depending on the scenario. Short-term network outages can result in frustrated customers and some loss of e-commerce system business.
Let’s take a closer look at the advanced data protection features that can quickly get your customers up and running, in the event of a disaster.
4 Advanced Data Protection Features of Disaster Recovery
Here are four things you need to include in your disaster recovery plan and process to ensure your business continuity.
- Know Your Threats
Learn about the history of your business, industry, and region and write down the threats you are likely to face. These should include natural disasters, geopolitical events such as wars or civil unrest, failure of critical equipment such as servers, internet connections, or software, and cyber-attacks that are likely to affect your type of business.
- Know Your Assets
It is vital to be comprehensive. Assemble your team and make an extensive list of essential assets for business operations such as network equipment, servers, workstations, software, cloud services, smartphones, and more in the IT field. Once you have your list, categorize items by:
- Critical tools without which your business can not operate – for example, an email server
- Essential tools that can seriously interfere with some activities – for example, a projector used for presentations
- Other means that will not have a significant impact on the business – for example, the recreation system used by employees during the lunch break
- Replicate Data
The cornerstone of almost any disaster recovery plan is to replicate data. While many businesses schedule periodic data backups, the preferred approach is to replicate data on another disaster recovery system continuously.
- Backups and Restoration of Services
Just as business systems can fail in a disaster, so can backups. There are many horror stories of organizations with a backup plan in place, which then discovered too late that their backups were not working correctly.
A configuration problem, software error, or hardware malfunction can make your backups useless, and you may never know it unless you test them.
Conclusion
When there is a disaster, disruption, ransom strike, or other disruption, you need to be able to get your organization back online quickly. That means you are always ready for anything.
And given the rapid changes in today’s IT environment, being ready may not be something you can afford to do on a yearly or even quarterly basis.
It must be a daily focus, and practicing the advanced data protection features can get your customer up and running quickly in a disaster.