Risky business…it is not just the name of the 1983 action movie starring Tom Cruise.
When it comes to doing business in 2022, companies face a wide range of potential disasters that could upend their operations. Business owners and IT professionals need to worry about everything from natural disasters, like hurricanes and flooding, to man-made problems. With innovators developing more sophisticated technology every day, this gives malicious hackers a gateway to causing serious damage.
Every company must take this seriously and make cyberattack prevention a high priority. It can be easy to sit back and hope for the best. But it’s much smarter to plan ahead and make a strategy in advance. That way, your company can respond swiftly when disaster strikes. By learning more about planning disaster recovery strategies, you can be prepared to help mitigate a disaster’s negative impact.
What is Disaster Recovery?
There’s a big difference between backup and recovery planning. This isn’t just about making sure that your critical data is accessible in multiple locations.
Savvy business owners know that it is important to engage in systemic business continuity planning to support long-term success. This is when the company plans ahead so that they know how to maintain or restore production during a catastrophic interruption.
Disaster recovery (DR) focuses on a company’s technological infrastructure. Companies proactively create formal and documented policies around disaster mitigation, especially when it comes to cyberattacks. They lay out detailed guidelines so that no matter who is working, employees can support a smooth experience. When a business’s primary systems and networks fail, this strategy enables them to repair technological infrastructure and efficiently restore its operations back to full capacity.
A Guide to Planning for Disaster Recovery
Every company has different business needs, so there aren’t any one-size-fits-all, cookie-cutter disaster recovery plans. Businesses need to understand their key operations down to the finest details, so they can create a plan that clearly defines potential risks, as well as how to respond to those risks.
1. Implement Proper Data Storage and Infrastructure
First and foremost, every disaster recovery plan should begin by emphasizing prevention. Although companies can’t avoid all disasters, they can prevent data loss by being intentional about data storage. Every business with extensive technological infrastructure should make plans for data backups, as well as generators and surge protectors.
2. Outline Recovery Objectives
Next, it is important to analyze your business’ current processes and long-term goals, as well as understand the potential risks that could disrupt its operations. The first step involves proactively establishing recovery objectives around system and data recovery so that you can create specific protocols to work with many possible scenarios. When a business sets its recovery time objective (RTO), they determine the time required to restore its mission-critical operations before experiencing intolerable repercussions. For their recovery point objective (RPO), a business must deduce how much data loss is accessible.
3. Develop Recovery Procedures
After setting your objectives, you can then develop your recovery procedures and determine the roles and responsibilities of employees during a disaster. It will be necessary to construct thorough profiles of your business’ inventory and digital applications. To understand your IT infrastructure, you must track your company’s use of hardware, software, and cloud services. It is crucial to rank them according to which assets are the most mission-critical. When you work with a firm that handles managed IT services, this can streamline your work.
4. Troubleshoot Recovery Procedures
You will also need to test your procedures and review them often. This will involve hosting a post-mortem after actual disasters. In that meeting, you will work together to update your best practices to be better prepared for the next incident. Companies should also regularly perform a risk analysis to figure out how to incorporate any new possible risks into their plan.
5. Establish a Crisis Communication Plan
Finally, companies often overlook how they will communicate with their customers. Depending on the nature of your business, you should also consider how you will communicate with the media and other stakeholders. Crisis communications and public relations are integral components of your disaster recovery plan.
Why is Being Prepared Important?
Long-Term Success
Every company desires to be successful in the long-term. They want their organization to benefit from continued financial viability. Therefore, it is crucial to prepare for a potential disaster — so you can protect your company and its assets. You can build a more resilient business that can weather unforeseen obstacles.
Functionality and Productivity
In our current digital era, the majority of our mission-critical resources live online. Without healthy IT systems, many businesses are essentially unable to function. For companies that work with a hybrid cloud model, this poses an extra risk. They must contend with multiple disaster recovery plans, in comparison to businesses with data centers that are either completely on-site or fully in the cloud.
Disaster recovery planning helps businesses avoid prolonged periods of reduced functionality and lost productivity. You can better guarantee a rapid recovery so you can resume your concentration on the work that you do best. Disaster recovery plans are cost-effective and resource-effective, saving your organization time and energy.
Industry Regulations
Disrupted business operations can also mean failing to meet your business’s legal obligations.
Preparing for a disaster also protects your productivity and costs by ensuring that you continue to comply with the industry regulations in your field. For example, the American government has specific regulations around emergency procedures for companies that deal with electronically protected health information (ePHI).
Customer Satisfaction
Additionally, disasters can lead to unhappy customers who are unable to use your services or product in the manner that they are accustomed to. Many expect 24/7 availability. As a result, your business can face a whole range of adverse economic impacts, like lost revenue, decreased competitive advantage, and reduced market share.
Less tangibly, you might observe clients losing faith in the business, which would hurt its reputation. In that case, preparing a disaster recovery plan is also a robust customer retention strategy that will benefit your organization in the long run. Your customers will continue to see you as a reliable resource.
Our Hosted Disaster Recovery Service Can Help
Through our enterprise-class disaster recovery service, we can help you maintain the availability of mission-critical applications and functions. Our skilled professionals ensure that you can mitigate the negative impacts of a disaster on your organization, guaranteeing that your operations and IT infrastructure experience minimal damage.
To begin, we tailor a disaster recovery plan to your business, leveraging our state-of-the-art Tier 3 data centre and enterprise-class cloud environment.
In order to smoothly run your digital infrastructure, you must understand how to optimize your asset utilization in your operations. Yet, it is complicated to manage the day-to-day needs of an IT system. So, we simplify that work and reduce your costs too.
With our hosted DR, your IT systems are supported and remain available for your users. We anticipate and prepare for the loss of power, hardware, software, data, and connectivity.
Intrigued? Contact us to learn about our Hosted Disaster Recovery Service.
