Disaster Recovery Tips to Keep Your Business Alive
Is your business ready to face disaster? Whether it’s a serious data breach, a natural catastrophe or a major system failure, your organization needs to be prepared for the worst to ensure that it doesn’t go down in a flaming heap.
1. Create a Risk Assessment
The key to any successful disaster recovery plan is being realistic. That means starting with a thorough risk assessment that catalogs every asset you own and lists the possible catastrophes that can affect your systems.
For instance, if you’re based in New York you should prepare for disastrous storms and cyberattacks, not volcano eruptions and alien invasions.
By maintaining an up-to-date inventory of all your assets and potential risks, you’ll be able to draw up a plan and set realistic recovery goals.
2. Draw Up a Plan
In an emergency situation, your employees can’t just be flailing their arms in the air while crying out for help. They need to know exactly what to do and whom to contact.
That’s why you should create a thorough contingency plan that lists what systems need to be recovered first and the proper procedure for dealing with specific scenarios.
In this phase, it pays to always ask yourself “What’s the worst that can happen?” This way you’ll be prepared for any unexpected surprises, whether it’s downtime or massive data loss.
3. Use Secure Offsite Backups
The advantage of storing your files in secure, offsite data centers is that if your computers ever break, you can jump to another machine and restore all your data instantly.
While there are many backup providers to choose from, make sure their facilities are equipped with strong network security systems and watched over constantly by a team of professionals. Check out reviews and their service-level agreements to see whether they can walk the walk.
4. Test Everything
You don’t want to just assume that your plan is good to go, you must be certain that your entire business can recover quickly and efficiently. That means partnering with a trusted managed services provider to simulate disaster recovery process.
Testing your plan also involves employees. Gather your team and run them through disaster recovery tabletop scenarios. The experience may sound like an even geekier version of Dungeons & Dragons, but your employees are sure to learn something by the end of it.
Do this every quarter so your employees know what to do during D-day.
5. Keep It Current
An outdated plan is useful for little more than scrap paper. If you’ve made any major upgrades or installed new systems, your disaster recovery plan won’t be particularly relevant for long.
Be sure to keep it up to date whenever you make significant changes to your infrastructure. Also make sure your employees are fully aware of changes so that they know how to execute your plan should the worst happen.
Every year, countless organizations around the world go up in flames because they didn’t have a robust-enough disaster recovery plan and business continuity process in place. That’s why Red Key Solutions offers fully automated backup and disaster recovery systems to make sure your business is prepared for anything. Call us today to find out what we can do for you.
