3 Essential Elements for your Disaster Recovery Plan
Smart leaders plan for the absolute worst even though their preference is that a disaster recovery plan is never needed. Disaster Recovery (DR) planning is addressing the question: what happens if disaster strikes and my business becomes inoperable because my computer system is down? What is my plan B for IT? If my daily operations are down, how long will it take to become operable again? How long can my business last if I cannot bill, and cannot access customer files?
These questions are addressed by having a DR plan in place. Over 50% of businesses never regain operations after disaster strikes. Disasters such as fire, flood, extreme weather events, theft, vandalism, or even insider sabotage can render a business inoperable. A disaster can take out electrical power, internet, destroy hardware and result in data loss. These unforeseen events can be addressed by having a disaster recovery plan in place. Much like life insurance, or other types of insurance, no one wants to cash in on these policies, but everyone is so glad to have them when they are needed.
A proper DR plan should address 3 key elements:
Obtaining Backups. Making sure that your business has reliable and readily accessible backups is crucial. Many business owners only find in a disaster event that their backups were not working when the disaster occurred. They must now hope that they can work from any partial backups or obtain data copies from multiple sources. Now they have 2 disasters to address. The other issue can be timing. How long does it take to retrieve your back up copies? The lag time that a backup provider makes you endure can be catastrophic. Could your business sustain major data loss? (such as billing and banking information)
Auxillary Hardware. Once you obtain your backup copies of your data you must have a readily available hardware option so that you can operate your business. You have to have a place for your backups to reside. This may be at a local data center or this may entail having your IT staff cobble together a system and get you operational. At the very least your DR plan should address this step so that you can execute the plan rather than have to formulate a detailed plan on the fly. I have seen many companies make expensive and regretful mistakes because they did not have a hardware plan in place.
Workflow prioritization. Once a company has switched over to their DR plan it is best to have a list of priorities for workflow. What systems must be addressed and in what order so that productivity can be regained as quickly and efficiently as possible. Does it make more sense to address operations and production? or marketing and executive functions first? What departments need to be reactivated and in what order? When time is of the essence it is best to know your company’s priorities so that you can get the right people back to work first. This is another element where a company can make expensive and regretful mistakes because they did not address their priorities.
Having a proper DR plan in place is an essential part of any business just like having insurance and reserves for unforeseen disasters. When disaster strikes then your company is ready to pull together and execute your DR plan so that you can become operation and profitable as quickly as possible. For a detailed disaster recovery plan we recommend that you contact your sales specialist at NthaCloud for free no obligation assessment. We can help you see your weak points and make recommendations for a strong DR plan. Contact us today at sales@nthacloud.com or call 303-565-7261.
