No business owners want to lose their business data. However, data disasters will stay take place. Companies will still lose their valuable data due to data disasters. Thus, a data recovery plan is important for every business. Your Disaster Recovery plan can help you in handling disasters like earthquakes, floods, and fires. It can also help you with handling security and data breaches.

Businesses are competing in a crowded marketplace. Thus, business continuity during a disaster can help you in preventing a huge loss. You can provide your business services to your customers during a disaster. In this article, we are going to share some tips that will help you in creating an action plan for data recovery.

List of potential threats

Threats can come in different sizes and forms. You should create a list of all the threats and categorize this list according to the impact of these threats. If some threat can cause a lot of damage to your system, then it should be mentioned at the top.

It will help you in determining the downtime that your business can handle. Some businesses can stay down for a long period of time without losing revenue. However, some businesses can’t stay down for even a few seconds.

You can calculate the cost of response by understanding your system downtime tolerance. If your system downtime tolerance is very low, then your response cost will be very high. This list will also help you in eliminating threats that can endanger your entire business. There might be some threats that can destroy your business operations if you don’t have a clear recovery path. Thus, you can save your business by creating a concrete recovery path.

Outline your data recovery and business continuity infrastructure

Your ability to respond to any disaster will depend on your BCDR or business continuity and disaster recovery infrastructure. It will include high bandwidth and high-speed connections. Also, it will include an uninterrupted power supply, resource duplication site, and your main data center. If your BCDR infrastructure is not working optimally, then it will become a huge obstacle for your business.

The best way to protect your business is by using a redundant approach. This approach simply means that you will have multiple mainframes and servers to run backups.

If your business production system is down, then you can use your existing local backup. Your competitors will try to dethrone you during a disaster. If you will take too much time to resume normal operations, then your competitors will easily snatch away your customers. Thus, you can’t afford a long system downtime.

The biggest issue for businesses during a disaster is the power supply. However, many business owners still don’t work on creating a BCDR system. You should work on creating a BCDR system that won’t be halted by a power outage.

You should monitor and analyze your entire network infrastructure. Many businesses will find a severed fiber cable during a disaster. Due to this, their entire network will go down.

Thus, you should ensure that your network connections are redundant in nature. Your network connections should follow multiple paths. Also, you can use a WAN topology for dealing with network threats. This will ensure that you can protect the backbone of your network during a disaster.

Build an inventory of your IT assets

You should also build an inventory of the IT assets that you are using. This will ensure that you know about the available business resources. Also, these resources will protect your business during a disaster.

Many MSPs and vendors are offering management tools to enterprises. You can use these tools for creating an accurate inventory of your business IT assets. These vendors will mostly use a module. This module will use advanced software for analyzing your IT infrastructure. It will store the data in the available software and hardware.

Define your contingency policy

This policy will help you in understanding how much downtime can your IT assets afford. This data is very important as it will help you in understanding the amount of money that you need for data recovery. If your organization’s assets, configurations, and service-level outlook are unknown, then you can’t create a contingency policy.

Also, you need this policy for connecting your business needs with your IT assets. You can’t convince your business executives until they understand the impact of disasters.

Test your contingency plan

You have to first convince your business executives of your contingency plan. After that, you can start developing it. Your plan should include the following points:

It should clearly mention the responsibility and role of every department.
Reasonability and role of every member during the data recovery process.
Procedures that your members need to follow for restoring your IT systems.
Mention the frequency of training exercises.
The data maintenance and backup schedules.
It should mention the resources that you need for implementing your contingency plan.

The contingency plan will always have three phases. First, your IT team will notify you about the disaster. After that, you will activate your plan and notify the emergency teams. Your emergency team will determine if you can use primary resources. If your main servers are down, then you can keep using the backup systems.

It is very important to regularly test your contingency plan. This will ensure that your plan actually works. You should also update your plan according to your business needs.

Conclusion

These tips will help you in creating a perfect action plan for disaster recovery. However, you should always test it for ensuring that your DR plan actually works. If you don’t have access to a good IT team, then you should consider working with an MSP. Experienced MSPs like Bleuwire can save your business during a disaster. They can help you in recovering your IT systems and data during a disaster. If you need more information regarding data recovery, then you can contact Bleuwire.

Contact us today to learn about Bleuwire™ services and solutions in how we can help your business.