5 steps to a solid disaster recovery plan

If your business was about to be destroyed by fire, and you had one minute to save one file, what would it be?

I’d guess not your pictures of Fluffy the cat. But maybe your payroll data or customer order list. A Disaster Recovery strategy defines which data you will save first and what will be available during planned or unplanned downtimes. It also plans for the data you can live without. Poor Fluffy.

Complexity vs. Costs

When you create your Disaster Recovery plan, you’ll need to weigh the trade-offs between complexity vs. costs. What data can you afford to be without? For how long? If you lost some data, would that destroy your business forever?

Five parts of a disaster recovery plan:

1. Recovery Point Objective (RPO). RPO defines how much data you are willing to lose. You can give higher priority to your most critical data, but be willing to lose less important data, such as pictures of Fluffy. Customer records might be top of your list, while marketing data might rank lower.

2. Recovery Time Objection (RTO). RTO weighs how long you are willing to be without your data. Depending on your business, you might decide that you can lose up to two hours of business operation. A shorter time will create higher costs, so you’ll need to consider your options carefully.

3. Personnel. Who should get their data back sooner? Who will support the plan? Do you have a backup person as well as backup technology? Is your plan dependent on human intervention, which may not be possible in all cases?

4. Regulatory constraints. Is your business subject to regulatory compliance? How will you make sure you are covered?

5. Critical data. Which data is critical to your business? What are the dependencies between different areas of the business?

Test and train

Often companies will create a plan, and then leave it on the shelf. They don’t fully test the plan, or consider multiple scenarios. When a disaster hits, whether it’s cybercrime or a hurricane or a rogue sprinkler system, the plan fails. The New York Stock Exchange had a plan before Hurricane Sandy, but they didn’t follow it when disaster hit. Instead, they closed the stock exchange for two days.

Your resources and business needs will change over time. This includes your location, personnel, and data. Testing your plan two to three times a year is one way to make sure the plan is up-to-date and still supports your current business goals.

Once you have a plan in place you’ll need to train all personnel. For a higher chance of success, ensure that senior management endorses the plan and promotes training for all employees.

Get help to create a plan

A cloud solution can help you find a good balance between cost and complexity. With Azure Site Recovery, you can easily create disaster recovery plans in the Microsoft Azure portal. The disaster recovery plans can be as simple or as advanced as your business requirements demand.

We’re here to help you with all stages of strategy, planning and implementation.

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Did you take a wrong turn on the road to disaster?

Can you find your way back if you take a wrong turn on the road to disaster? If disaster strikes, recovering from it could cost you thousands of dollars, plus lose your customer’s good faith.

Having a plan to save your business from bad things will help you get back on track.

Most businesses rely on technology to run their day-to-day processes. Think email, Word docs, customer information and ordering systems, inventory, accounting. Other companies are all about the tech. Think Uber, Airbnb, Constant Contact and many others.

So, if something disastrous happens, your business could grind to a halt, whether tech is your main business or ‘just’ how you get your work done every day. What could go wrong? Well, there's floods. Plus, electrical storms, hurricanes, fire and people who leave with your passwords or source code. Without a backup plan, your business could be in trouble.

What’s included in a plan?

Disaster plans can cover everything from how to get out of your store or office during a fire drill, to how to get back up and running if your servers are underwater.

Then, you can take it a step further. If you think about staying in business during a disaster, as well as recovery, you’ll be in the best shape you could be.

While it’s important to customize a plan for your business, every plan should include:

* Technology asset inventory that names mission critical processes and data

* Schedule for updating and testing any disaster recovery plans

* Clear understanding of the trade-offs between cost and complexity

Murphy’s Law

Murphy’s Law says that whatever can go wrong, will go wrong. That’s why it’s important to understand how your plan works. If you are a business decision maker, you might hand this over to your IT team. But it’s important to ask some questions to make sure you have full coverage for your business. A few questions:

* Does your plan include an inventory of mission critical business processes and data?

* When was the last time anyone reviewed your plan? Tested your plan?

* Is cyberattack preparedness included in your current plan?

* How much depends upon human intervention?

Evaluate Cloud Solutions

During a disaster, humans have other priorities than failing over their virtual machines. Automating your solution is key to ensuring success.

A cloud solution can help you recover quickly. And it’s less expensive than having your own datacenter to support and protect. It’s a practical solution for a business, whether it’s large or small. But it makes especially good financial sense for a smaller organization.

Not all cloud providers are equal, so you’ll need to do some research to compare. A few considerations:

* Do they offer a hybrid solution, so that you can keep some data on premise as well as in the cloud?

* Do they offer metered service so that you can save even more money by ‘turning off’ services when you don’t need them?

* Is the service easy to use, with good support for your team?

* Do they offer geo-redundancy?

* Are they compliant with your industry?

Is the cloud safe?

But wait a minute, you might say. I’ve read about companies, even big companies, losing data in the cloud during a disaster.

It’s true, there have been times when the cloud failed companies. When this happened, it was because the data was only stored in one location. And it was based in the same region as the company. That’s an obvious mistake.

With the Microsoft cloud, you can get ‘geo-redundancy.’ This means that your data is in more than one location. So, if your area is hit with a hurricane, along with floods and electrical storms, your data would be safe in a datacenter across the country.

That also means that your company data is available even during the storm.

Steps to take

1. We’d love to meet you and discuss your plans for keeping your business running. If you’re ready right now, call us or send an email. We’re happy to set up a free consultation to review your plan.

call: 858-429-3000

email: sales@managedsolution.com

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