In today’s information economy, businesses thrive on the intellectual property they produce. This is a fancy way to say that your data (Word docs, spreadsheets, databases, customer lists, etc.) is the heart and soul of your business. The challenge for many small businesses is that they never slow down long enough to make sure that they are properly protecting their intellectual property – the livelihood of businesses – until something goes wrong.
Most studies conducted on traditional, accepted, and regularly utilized “backups” prove that they fail anywhere from 50% – 70%% of the time when restore attempts are made! Call me crazy, but those are not odds I would entrust my company’s data with. Is your organization prepared to recover from an IT disaster? According to Info-Tech Research Group, almost 60 percent of North American businesses do not have a disaster recovery plan in place to resume IT services in case of crisis.
Ensuring that sensitive information, such as customer records, not only remains protected during a crisis, but is accessible following a crisis, is a business-critical requirement. Here are six tips we recommend for IT disaster recovery planning.
1. Devise a disaster recovery plan
Define not only what is important to keep the business running, but also the “recovery time objective” or how quickly the organization needs to be up and running post-disaster. Other key plan components to consider are who declares the disaster, how employees are informed of a disaster, and the best method to reassure customers of the company’s continued ability to service them.
2. Test the disaster recovery plan
Perform rigorous testing one or more times per year in simulated realistic conditions to determine the effectiveness of the disaster recovery plan.
3. Perform off-site data backup and storage
Off-site data backup and storage is critical for organizations of all types. Companies need to determine the acceptable time between the last available backup and any potential disruption. For some organizations, this “recovery point objective” or RPO must be measured in minutes, while others can live with an RPO of up to 24 hours. Every organization should backup its data at least once daily, but it is preferable to perform more frequent backup or ” continuous data protection.”
4. Perform data restoration tests
Companies need to perform monthly restoration tests to validate that a restoration can be accomplished during a disaster. Furthermore, the backup software and the hardware on which data resides needs to be checked daily to verify that backup is completed successfully. With tape backup, companies need to store the tapes in an offsite location that is secure and accessible, while disk systems need to have an offsite replication if the backup is not run offsite initially.
(We often find during technology reviews of new clients that data has not been backed up for weeks or even months – althought the tapes have been changed!)
5. Be redundant
Disaster recovery time can be cut down to minutes rather than days when organizations establish redundant servers for all critical data and provide an alternate way to access that data. Redundancy can extend to alternative data centers for key servers and data to ensure issues onsite do not interrupt business operations.
6. Consider a managed services provider or managed backup solution
For small- to medium-sized organizations, it is often cost prohibitive to implement a sound disaster recovery plan. Managed services providers have the technical personnel to design, implement and manage complex disaster recovery projects, and have the server, storage and network infrastructure in place to manage a true disaster recovery plan. This shared infrastructure can offer cost-effective solutions for small and medium-sized organizations.
Bottom Line
Organizations of all sizes are vulnerable to experiencing a crisis that could prevent them from continuing normal business operations at any time. A well-structured and coherent disaster recovery plan will enable companies to recover quickly and effectively from an unforeseen disaster or unplanned downtime, thus avoiding significant business interruption and loss.
If you would like to have The Launch Pad complete an independent review of your organizations backup and recovery plan please don’t hesitate to call. We have helped hundreds of businesses rest easy at night by providing them the correct tools and insight to know their business is protected.
