Modern businesses invest billions of dollars every year in technology, so it only makes sense that they should do everything to protect it. After all, an IT disaster can quickly lead to enormous losses, particularly if you’re still relying on the break/fix support model rather than proactively protecting your technology assets.
Your business faces many types of threats, including natural disasters, physical damage or theft and, perhaps most common of all, digital risks from hackers and malicious software. To mitigate these threats, you need to plan for the worst, no matter how secure you think your systems may be. Doing so requires creating a regularly reviewed emergency plan that prioritizes and protects your systems.
How to Safely Back Up Your Data
Most business leaders are already aware of the importance of keeping data safely backed up in an off-site location, but there’s a lot more to IT emergency planning than backup alone. It’s every bit as important to choose a secure solution for keeping your data safe, and that means considering physical, technical, and administrative security measures. Simply backing everything up on tape drives and moving them to an off-site location -- which is the old-fashioned way of doing things -- isn’t enough.
Even though what you back up and the frequency of the backup are indeed very important, you also need to know where your data is stored and which redundancies are in place to protect it. A cloud-based backup and disaster-recovery service, for example, should keep your data in a secure co-location center that has all the necessary security measures in place to protect it from disaster. Furthermore, there should always be additional redundant systems in other locations.
Why You Need to Think Beyond Backup
Backup is a key element of any emergency-planning strategy, but there’s a lot more to keeping your systems and data safe than backup alone. You also need a way to restore your systems quickly following a disaster because any unnecessary downtime can end up costing your business dearly. You need to consider two very important metrics when choosing the right backup solution: recovery point objectives (RPOs) and recovery time objectives (RTOs).
Your RPO refers to the amount of data you can afford to lose. As such, it helps you determine how frequently you need to update your backups. For example, losing a day’s worth of data might be acceptable, but if your most recent backup is two days old, that might translate into unacceptable losses. You’ll likely want to assign different objectives to different systems, depending on how important they are.
Your RTO refers to the maximum amount of time it should take to restore your data and systems. While downtime is inevitable during a disaster, you’ll want to keep it to a minimum to avoid an unacceptably severe impact on your profits. RTO is especially important when selecting a cloud-based disaster recovery service, since recovery speed heavily depends on the commitment of the service provider as well as the speed of your internet connection.
The Importance of Employee Training
Remember, your IT emergency plan is only ever going to be as effective as your team is at implementing it. That’s why employee training is essential for ensuring your disaster-response strategy is up to the job of reporting and recovering your data per your security protocols and your recovery objectives.
Your RTO depends on someone immediately reporting a system failure. By training your employees, you’ll be able to reduce the chances of a disaster happening in the first place, while also creating a culture of accountability that ensures everyone knows what to do should the worst happen.
Chances are, your technology is your business’s most important asset. That’s why OC-IT provides affordable and scalable disaster-recovery solutions that help prepare your organization for any eventuality. Call us today to learn more about our solutions.