Tips for effective disaster recovery

Cyberthreats and natural disasters are always just around the corner, waiting to jeopardize your business operations. Without disaster recovery (DR) measures, you can experience major data loss that can be detrimental to your company’s survival.

In a 2017 report by Nationwide, it was revealed that 68% of small-business owners don’t have a written disaster recovery plan. Fortunately, managed IT services providers (MSPs) like OC-IT can help your business devise and carry out an effective DR plan.

Identify and prioritize your critical assets

Recovering all your IT assets quickly after a disaster is ideal, but money and support required to make this happen is unfeasible. That’s why you should identify hardware, software, and data that are critical to your business’s operations and prioritize them for recovery.

Your company should perform a regular inventory of your technology assets so you can easily determine which ones are worth saving during a crisis.

Make use of your cloud technology

The usefulness of backups is determined by their recency and recovery time. To ensure fast recovery, your business should save backups in the cloud. A cloud backup always saves the most recent version of your files and can be accessed on any device as long as you have authentic user credentials and a secure internet connection.

Since cloud data is stored in a virtual environment, your assets are safe from localized disasters. What’s more, cloud tech experts manage your backups and facilitate the recovery process so you have nothing to worry about.

Make the most out of virtualization

As natural calamities and cyberattacks continue to halt business operations, systems breakage are becoming more common. With virtualization, you can trick your computer into working as if the applications you’re using are running on a local machine, when in fact, you’re accessing the apps from somewhere else.

Having this secondary digital environment and transferring your operations there allows you to resume work and get back on track without further delay or disruptions in the event of a disaster.

Develop a foolproof recovery plan

• Strict recovery timeline

  Just like any good plan, disaster recovery works best if it follows a timeline. You have to determine specific objectives and set deadlines to help you reach your goal. Your timeline should be reasonable, and must consider how long before your company can restore your backups and how long will it take to resume operations and provide services to your clients.

• Ensure the efficiency of your plan

  There’s no better way to test the efficiency of your plan but to test it. By simulating disaster scenarios, whether by tabletop exercises or controlled outages, you can determine parts of the DR plan that don’t work. For example, employees may be unclear with specific recovery procedures or may not know whom to contact during a crisis.

  This practice can help you develop and optimize your DR plan over time. When an actual incident occurs, the time you spent on testing, improving, and training can cut your recovery time in half.

• Keep your plan up to date

  A lot can happen between the inception of your recovery plan and an actual disaster. Therefore, you should regularly update your plan and align it with your recent production environment. Having a run-through of the plan with these important changes and additions will keep you on top of your disaster recovery strategy.

OC-IT would love to help you build a robust recovery plan. If you want to secure your California-based business and keep your operations running even after a disaster, contact us and let our experts protect and manage your digital assets 24/7/365.