Cybercrime is growing with time. Businesses are becoming more vulnerable and downtime is becoming more expensive. A quick look at downtime numbers is enough to motivate any company. Your company can lose up to $5600 per minute of downtime. More than 40% of businesses close after a disaster. Also, more than 25% of businesses fall after one year. More than 70% of businesses don’t have any disaster recovery plan.

Every IT professional is worried about downtime. They are worried about errors or events that will create permanent data loss or downtime. However, still, many companies are not focusing on their disaster recovery plan. They are not implementing good disaster recovery plans.

The main reason behind this is due to the fact that disaster recovery planning takes a lot of time. You need to invest a lot of time into creating your disaster recovery plan. DR solution is very important for every business. However, sometimes IT professionals are too busy. Thus, they don’t have time to make anticipatory steps.

Your disaster recovery will start with a plan always. You should focus on building a strong disaster recovery plan. In this article, we are going to give you some tips that will help you in building a disaster recovery plan. These tips will help you in creating a disaster plan which will eventually help you in building a reliable and robust solution.

Emergency contact list

You should first create an emergency contact list. This list should contain information from all the vendors. These vendors will help you during a disaster. Also, you should include the contact information of your ISP. If you are working with an MSP, then you should also include their information on this list. This will ensure that you can easily find your vendor contact information during a disaster.

Create a list of important systems

You should first identify all your critical IT assets. It is important to create a list of important systems, SQL server, phone lines, and email. You also need to find the dependencies that exist between these systems. This will help you in determining the impact of a single POF. You can provide some value or percentage to every item in your IT environment.

You should create a list of your systems and sort them according to their priority. After that, you need to find the maximum amount of downtime that your systems can tolerate. You can use online downtime calculators for estimating how much downtime you can handle. This will ensure that your managers know about your expectations. They will first work on recovering your important systems. This will help you in limiting the damage caused by downtime.

Create a plan for every disaster scenario

You should know about the serious threats that can disrupt your IT environment. There are various disasters like natural disasters, system failure, power outages, internet outages, and human error. You need to also think about UPS System failure which happens in more than 29% of cases. More than 24% of businesses face downtime due to human errors. Only 3% of businesses are actually hit by a natural disaster.

Thus, you first need to worry about accidental or technical issues. You can prevent these disasters by taking precautions. Natural disasters are already very hard to prevent.

If you think that your business can be hit by a natural disaster, then you should use cloud services. This will help you in minimizing the downtime to 0. You don’t need to worry about losing access to your data and systems as they are stored in a remote location. This is the best option for companies to deal with natural disasters.

You should also check all the downtime that you have experienced in past. It is important to learn from these dreadful experiences. This will help you in finding the greatest vulnerability in your IT environment. Your IT environment might be down to a lack of power supply. Also, you need to deal with vulnerable and old software. You might still be using legacy software that might be the cause of downtime. It is important to find vulnerabilities in your plan.

Look for a backup and DR solution

You need to find the best backup and DR solution for your IT environment. The choice will ultimately depend on your environment and on your data. Every business has a different IT environment and data needs.

There are various things that you should look for in a backup and DR solution. First, you should know how much data you are backing up. Extensibility is also becoming a major factor for businesses. Your backup solution might need to grow with your business. Speed is also going to be an important factor. Make sure that you can quickly retrieve and initiate backups. This is very important for businesses that can’t afford downtime. You should look for a backup and DR solution that will fit in your IT budget.

There are currently three backup options available. You can go for the old tape backups. However, these backups can be very slow. You need to spend a lot of time backing up your files. Also, you need to store these tape backups in multiple data centers for maintaining redundancy. This is not possible for most of the small and medium-sized businesses.

You can also go for disk-to-disk backup. It is similar to tape backups but you can quickly backup your data. The best option for SMBs right now is cloud backup. Cloud backup will ensure that you can quickly store your data in the cloud. Also, you can store your data in multiple locations.

Conclusion

These tips will help you in creating a good DR plan. However, you need access to IT expertise for creating a Disaster recovery plan. Thus, you should consider working with a good MSP. Experienced MSPs like Bleuwire can help you in creating your DR plan. If you are using cloud backup, then they will help you in setting up your cloud environment. Thus, SMBs don’t need to worry about hiring any IT professionals. If you need more information regarding the Disaster recovery plan, then you can contact Bleuwire.

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