Are you aware of the best practices for disaster recovery and does your business have a current disaster recovery plan?
Those are two questions you should ask yourself immediately. If the answer is ‘no’ to either or both questions, your business could be at risk when a disaster strikes or after a major network event.
We’re going to explain what disaster recovery is and why it’s important. We’re also going to take a look at the best way to backup and store data, how disaster recovery improves the chances of business continuity, and tell you about disaster recovery best practices.
Keep reading for more information.
What is Disaster Recovery Planning?
Disaster recovery planning helps to ensure your business continuity in the event of any natural or man-made disaster event. It considers your IT infrastructure, how you’d access pertinent data and programs post-disaster, as well as the IT resources your business requires in order to function.
Generally, a disaster is considered any type of unexpected event that affects a company’s network, resulting in the interruption, failure, or extreme slowing of services and connections. Disasters may be weather events like hurricanes and tornadoes, natural disasters like wildfires, or even man-made issues like cyber and terrorist attacks.
Additionally, for disaster planning purposes, events may also be network failures and power outages.
A successful disaster recovery plan will anticipate the likelihood of any potential disasters and ensure that a procedure is in place to allow your business the fastest possible access to any critical IT infrastructure.
Disaster Recovery Best Practices
As you build your disaster recovery plan, there are a few best practices that you’ll want to keep in mind:
- Keep a written or printed version of your disaster plan and know where it’s located - if there is any time before a disaster strikes, you don’t want to have to find your plan or attempt to print it out. You also will want to know each procedure you must follow to ensure business continuity and have access to your plans post-disaster should the event occur unexpectedly, leaving you with no time to make other preparations
- Store your system backups off-site - depending on how you choose to backup your data, you’ll need to ensure that recent copies of it are stored in a location that isn’t being affected by the same disaster
- Update your disaster plans regularly - technology, business, and personnel can change often. Disaster recovery plans should reflect these changes in order to be as helpful and accurate as possible
- Plan to return to normalcy - your disaster plan should include the recovery process for your business to return to normal operations and the steps that should be taken for this to happen
- Test your plan - while creating a disaster recovery plan is a great practice, it won’t be helpful if it doesn’t work during a disaster. Ensure that your plan works by testing it in a realistic simulated disaster
Disaster planning best practices will also include considerations for recovery point objective (RPO) and recovery time objective (RTO). RPO is how often your business takes backups of specific files and your system as a whole; if you don’t frequently update your backups, how much data can you afford to lose?
RTO is how long your business can withstand being offline before major negative impacts occur and how long it may take your business to recover from a disaster.
Choosing a Backup Storage Method
A huge part of disaster recovery planning best practices is to ensure that all pieces of important data are backed up in a secondary location. Some businesses find that using external hard drives or removable storage media works well for these purposes.
Other businesses choose to store data in cloud-based systems to allow for regular remote access and to ensure access for post-disaster purposes.
Both types of storage methods have their advantages and disadvantages.
Choosing to store data on external hard drives or other types of removable media means that the information can be lost or stolen. Removable media devices also have been known to become corrupted due to power failures and improper use. Additionally, these devices have finite storage limitations.
The biggest benefit that comes with using storage devices is the fact that they can be used almost immediately after power is restored and do not require access to the internet.
Cloud-based storage allows for safe, off-site storage of all company data and gives authorized users remote access from anywhere in the world, making it ideal in the event of a hurried evacuation. Cloud-based storage also has fewer limitations; the biggest one being how much digital storage space you choose to purchase.
Unfortunately, cloud storage does require internet access which may not be immediately available after a disaster occurs.
Although choosing to backup data to both types of storage methods isn’t always ideal, it can help prevent major data loss after a disaster strikes which can help improve your RPO and RTO.
Hope for the Best, Plan for the Worst
Most people and business owners don’t want to think about the recovery process after a disaster strikes. Unfortunately, those who don’t make a plan for these types of events are often the ones left with little or no business continuity and will only return to normal operations through luck and willpower.
You shouldn’t leave disaster recovery planning to chance. Follow the best practices for disaster recovery we have listed here to begin the planning process. Then, call Group CCI to learn the best data backup and storage methods and to ensure business continuity after a disaster strikes.
