Can you imagine a situation when even your backup fails?
Yes, we know that’s one of the worst things that can happen to your business. But as much as we don’t want to imagine such a situation, it’s always better to be prepared for it.
When you rely on just your local storage and a backup, you don’t have any way to get back the lost data when the IT system goes down. Having a disaster recovery plan ready will help you salvage the data and critical business information even when the unfortunate happens.
If you haven’t yet started the disaster recovery planning, then this blog will guide you to build one for your business.
7 Tips for Planning Disaster Recovery for Businesses
Before we go on to the actual procedure of setting up a disaster recovery plan, you need to understand that this is more than just a backup. A disaster recovery plan comes into play when your main system, as well as the backups, fail.
Many IT consulting firms and cloud service providers work together to offer disaster recovery planning customized to your business. Even when you hire one, it’s always essential to know the planning that goes behind.
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1. Assess Your Threats & Risks
How will the disaster occur?
This must be the first question you ask yourself and your IT team. Assess your IT infrastructure and backup options and think about all the various ways in which it goes down, gets corrupted, or, even worse, hacked.
If you want to prepare for the worst, you have to think about the worst to create procedures to tackle the situation.
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2. Identify & Prioritize the Critical Systems
Creating a disaster recovery plan by considering all of your threats is essential. However, what will happen when multiple threats happen at once?
This is when you need to prioritize. Think of all the bare minimum that you need to run your business and on which you have critical information. You should prioritize the recovery of such systems first.
As a part of the disaster recovery plan, you need to have a priority list of systems you need to recover in order. Put this down in writing so that your IT team can get to the task by referring to this list when the chaos breaks out.
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3. Have a Quick Response Team
You may think that your entire IT team is more than enough to manage any such crisis. But, more often, the IT team will get drowned in a chaotic situation with so many things to handle.
This is when you need to bring the recovery experts in. These are people who plan and execute the disaster recovery day in and day out and, therefore, have the skillset to quickly get on the job without getting anxious.
You can either hire the experts and make them a part of your in-house team or have a third-party team outsourced and ready.
At LayerOne Networks, we offer disaster recovery and security service for companies in Corpus Christi. Our recovery experts have worked on multiple projects to successfully recover and restore the data within minimal downtime. You can call us at (361)-653-6800 for more information.
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4. Create Proper Communication Channels
Who should your IT team inform first when the disaster strikes? Who is next? And next?
All of this information should be put in writing and given to the IT team. It is easy to get flustered and confused when a disaster strikes. So, having documentation of the communication channels will set the IT team in the right direction to resolve and recover.
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5. Be Realistic in Your Recovery Goals
We want the disaster to be managed as soon as possible and the IT system restored quickly. But that’s not what happens in real life. Creating unrealistic goals for the recovery would only make things even worse.
So, to have realistic goals, we need to understand two parameters: Recovery Point Objective (RPO) and Recovery Time Objective (RTO). Both of these metrics tell us the acceptable amount of time your system can be down and the time it will take to recover the data. We need to understand and keep track of the metrics when retrieving the data.
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6. Test Your Recovery Plan
We cannot stress more the importance of having a trial run of the recovery plan. You can identify the bottlenecks in the plan and improve it only when you go through the disaster recovery process.
Furthermore, it prepares your employees to respond properly and take the necessary actions to support the recovery. You can conduct trial runs for disaster recovery every once in a few months so that the employees remember what to do when the real thing strikes.
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7. Detail the Alternate Recovery Plans
This is the most desperate situation a business can find itself in. Nonetheless, we need to plan for it.
There have been instances where the employees couldn’t access the local disaster recovery sites or cloud storage during an emergency due to unavoidable reasons.
So, what’s the next step in that case? Do you plan to have some critical data stored in another online backup storage? Or do you have a plan to have some offline backup at a distant location?
Think about what to do in the worst-case scenario when the recovery plan doesn’t go through. You can plan to have backup storage at an alternate location and get it delivered or some cloud location where your team can access critical files.
Read More: IT Resilience vs. Disaster Recovery: Understanding the Difference
Wrapping Up
Having a disaster recovery plan is a must for every business due to the number of threats and risks we’re open to. At Layer One Networks, our recovery experts offer managed IT services in Corpus Christi to help businesses prepare and safeguard themselves against disasters.
You can schedule a consultation call with one of our experts to know more about how we can help you.