Disaster Recovery Basics

Disaster recovery is something that every business should put a considerable amount of thought into.  In the case of some horrible, unforeseen event, a good disaster recovery plan can be the deciding factor between the company making it through just fine, and the company disintegrating and closing forever.  A disaster recovery plan doesn’t have to be difficult or complicated, especially if you run a small or medium-sized company, but it can be a little intimidating for anyone who isn’t sure where to start.  Here are a few tips.

Prioritize

 Of course, if a disaster strikes, the perfect response would have all aspects of your company back up and running instantly.  However, this is impossible.  Each aspect takes time and resources to reinstate.  Because of this, a major part of your recovery plan should be figuring out which areas are more important than others, and which ones should be rebuilt first.  For example, your company is unlikely to experience any large-scale problems if your research and development department is down for a few days, or even a couple of weeks.  However, every hour that your customer service department is unreachable can be devastating to your company’s reputation.  In this case, it would be important to focus on resetting the customer service department before dealing with research and development.

Set up backups

Even the best recovery plan isn’t worth much if there’s nothing to recover.  While you’re working on your plan, go ahead and take a fresh look at the system you’re using to back up your data.  Consider the safety of the system, the reliability during and after any event or disaster, and the speed and ease of recovery should it become necessary.

Educate, practice, and test

A perfect disaster recovery plan becomes useless in the even it is needed if the staff that will be responsible for the process don’t already know what to do.  Spend whatever time and resources are necessary to train your employees on your new recovery plan.  Once they all know what they’re doing in theory, put them to the test with a couple of practice rounds.  This is also a great way to test the plan itself.

Working on a disaster recovery plan and need some help?  Contact us.  We’re experts and can make sure you’re on the right track.