From storms and hurricanes to blackouts and power failures, anything can disrupt your business. Your worker’s productivity will decline and it will become too difficult to meet your customer needs. But, you can avoid all this by creating an effective disaster management policy. By developing a good cloud-based recovery strategy your business can recover smoothly from any disaster.
In the world of the internet, disasters can destroy your whole business. Your customers expect employee assistance and online services 24 hours every day. They don’t care about the circumstances. If your employees can’t access their networks or databases during a disaster, then your whole business will be in huge trouble.
Disasters are always unexpected. Your company can only survive the disaster by having an effective recovery plan. According to a report by Insurance Institute for Business and Home Safety, more than 25% of businesses are unable to resume their operations after some major disaster. If all your servers are running in your house, then you are more vulnerable to a disaster. You can lose all your data due to these disasters.
Thus, we need our IT infrastructure to be running even in disasters. You can follow the below steps to maintain business continuity during a disaster.
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Strategy meeting
If your business is hit by any disaster, then first you should hold a strategy meeting. Make sure to include your CEO, CTO, office managers, managed service providers, and IT team. You should discuss critical issues and what should you do to keep your business running. Some questions you should include in the strategy meeting are:
- What will happen if there is a power outage?
- What should be set up to prepare your IT department for a disaster?
- How your IT department and employees get their data?
- How many employees should work during any disaster outage?
- Should you consider doing your meeting in a hotel, in case your employees can’t reach your office?
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Understand the threat
Fires, ransomware viruses and winter storms are some threats for which all enterprises should prepare. Your IT department must understand all the possible threats that can hit your office, server or communication room. Thus, it will become easy to prepare for the worst situation. IT department can do this by assessing risk based on the location of your data centers and office. When you are creating your disaster recovery plan make sure that you are treating every incident as unique. Ransomware or cyber attack can delete your whole server, whereas a fire may only affect 2-3 machines.
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Proper Planning
After understanding the threat it is time to do proper planning. Your IT department head should update or develop a disaster recovery plan. You should include all the worst-case scenarios that can happen during a disaster. Your IT department and managed service providers should work together to create a perfect plan. They should give top priority to the company data and information. Also, they should give a list of any system or equipment they need for recovering from the disaster.
Your backup plan should address concerns like:
- When will you activate this plan?
- A communications protocol that will be followed during the disaster
- Who will perform the emergency functions?
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Setup cloud backup and offsite hosting
It is important for every enterprise to set up IT systems that will help in minimizing the downtime. They will help you in maintaining business continuity during a disaster. If you have a small business, then you can set up a cloud in only 2 weeks. But, it can take up to a year for a larger enterprise with more data.
You can look for a business continuity package that provides both file backup on the cloud and hosting services. Try to find solutions that can automatically back up your data to the cloud. This will make sure that your business is operating even if your servers are down.
If you are buying service from an offsite hosting provider, then make sure that you are opting for the best plan. Your plan must include important things like continuous up-time and battery backups. You can also make hard copies of all your data. Store them in a safe location which won’t be impacted by any disaster.
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Test your plan
Combating downtime and data loss is easier when you have already tested your strategy. You should prepare for the worst scenarios. Your employees should know their role. The best way to test your plan is by running a mock disaster scenario. Thus, your employees will get a chance to practice their role. This will also provide you an opportunity to assess your plan. If any issue is arising during the practice run, then you can change your plans.
After testing your plan, you can refine your plan according to your enterprise needs. Test your plan again and improve your plan until you are confident that your enterprise will survive any disaster. This will help you in creating the most effective recovery plan.
Conclusion
It is simple to plan for disaster. But, first, you have to correctly asses your landscape. After that, your IT department can come up with an effective disaster recovery plan. They should do proper planning and preparation for the worst-case scenarios. It is also very important to buy cloud services. All your data should be stored in your cloud. This will make sure that your business is always operating. Lastly, you should do proper testing of your plan. You should improve your plan according to your business needs. If you’re still confused about your recovery plan, then you contact Bleuwire. They will help you in designing a perfect disaster recovery plan.
Contact us today to learn about Bleuwire™ services and solutions in how we can help your business.
