Disaster recovery has become a crucial component of a business as companies increasingly rely on technology for their day-to-day operations. Whether the disaster is natural or man-made, ensuring that you don’t lose crucial data and get back to business as usual as quickly as possible can help your company survive.
If you’ve never created a disaster recovery plan before, you likely don’t know where to start. That’s why we put together this list of aspects that every disaster recovery plan should include.
Create a disaster recovery team
Knowing who will be responsible for getting your business through a disaster will help ensure that calmer heads prevail. Choose someone who understands the business well and is also known for staying calm in stressful situations.
Assess threats
Determine what sorts of disasters your business could reasonably encounter, and whether you need to do anything special to protect your business from them. If you are in an area prone to hurricanes, your disaster recovery might not be the same as it would if you were responding to a hacking event.
Evaluate and sort assets
Order your company’s assets in order of importance, with the most critical assets at the top of the list. This will help you to determine what needs to get restored first, and what can wait until things calm down a bit.
Define data loss threshold and downtime tolerance
Understanding your data loss threshold will help you determine how frequently you need to have backups occur and this will be different for every business. Understanding how long you can be down before your business suffers will allow you to make a plan that gets you back up and running in time.
Create disaster recovery sites
Once you have determined what assets you need, and how often you need to have your data backed up, you can choose where to store the backups. It is recommended that you have backups in more than one place if possible.
Document everything
You don’t want to have to rely on your memory in a crisis situation. If everything is well-documented in an easy-to-find place, you will know that you are prepared for anything.
Test backups and restoration
Don’t forget to test everything when you’re done. You may have accidentally missed an important step that could mean the difference between success and failure in the event of a disaster.
At Stimulus Technologies, we have helped many businesses create their disaster recovery plan. Contact us today for more information!