Disaster Recovery Planning

Natural disasters can strike without warning, and getting your business back up and running during the aftermath can be difficult, expensive, and time-consuming. Without a disaster recovery plan, your business is risking permanent data loss, significant downtime, mounting recovery costs, and damage to your reputation. Proper planning minimizes data loss and maximizes employee productivity through this difficult time.

Plan Ahead

The primary goal of any disaster recovery plan is to limit the loss of data and maintain business continuity. This allows you to mitigate risk, limit downtime, and ensure that client records are safe and protected. Your backup plan must provide at least two levels of redundancy, for both data (at least two backups of any given file), and geography (file storage in at least two distinct locations). When formulating a plan, it’s best to work with an experienced partner skilled in disaster recovery and business continuity planning. A professional will help you establish policies, procedures, and technologies to protect your data and maintain business flow in the event of disaster. This process will likely include a review of your current policies, testing to identify vulnerabilities, establishing requirements, and implementing the new disaster recovery plan.

Test And Update

It’s a horror story we hear far too often: a business has a catastrophic data loss and turns to their backup system to recover the data, only to discover a serious flaw in their backup strategy. Maybe data was only backed up monthly instead of daily, or important files were left out of the backup entirely, or the backup hardware failed. No matter the cause, the results are the same: a worthless backup due to insufficient recovery plan testing. Test your backup system immediately upon implementation, and continue to test it on a regular basis to ensure that your backups remain current.

While you can’t prevent every possible disaster, proper preparation will protect your data and ensure the continuity of your business.