Why Your Business Needs an IT Disaster Recovery Plan

Disasters happen when you least expect them. Once they’ve occurred, if you don’t have a plan, it’s difficult to know what the best thing to do is in the heat of the moment.

That’s why your business needs an IT disaster recovery plan—so that you already have a well thought out process on what to do, one which you can have confidence in and can execute on right away.

Why Is It Important?

Whether it’s a natural disaster, such as fires, floods (and earthquakes, if you’re in the Bay Area), or man-man, such as ransomware and breaches, having a plan in place helps your business recover faster, without losing valuable data.

Any kind of disaster also causes two main issues – downtime and potential data loss. Both cost your business time and money. The longer it takes to recover from them, the more your expenses and losses increase. From storms to a convincing phishing scam, consider that your business is always at risk. While you can take steps to mitigate risks to reduce their impact, disasters can happen at any time. How long it takes for you to recover will determine how severely your business’s ability to survive will be impacted.

If you don’t have a disaster recovery plan in place, you’ll increase downtime and the overall cost of the disaster. For instance, the impact of having to deal with a ransomware attack can go from:

• Losing access to all your data just until the attack is over, or even permanently, scrambling in a haphazard manner to plug the “holes”, not knowing what to do because you had no recovery plan in place;

To:

• Being able to recover quickly as if nothing ever happened, because you did.

How To Put It Together

One of the most important services a managed IT services provider can do for you is to put together a disaster recovery plan for you. Having a plan in place that is tailored to your business requirements ensures when a disaster does strike, you’ll have a clear, step-by-step recovery plan. It will tell you exactly how to get your data and systems to get back online as quickly as possible with minimal interference to your business operations. When your technology suddenly stops working due to a disaster, you’ll want that plan to be in place, and ready to implement. Obviously, some elements will only apply to certain types of disasters, such as having a secondary location strategy.

The most common strategies every disaster recovery plan should include are:

• Data backup

  • A reliable data backup strategy should be defined that either stores all data backups off-site in a secure location, or implements a hybrid model of on-site and off-site data backups.
  • You should also have specifics on how to access and restore backups after a disaster.

• Alternative systems

  • If you can’t access your business systems for any reason, you’ll want an alternative method. This might include having a full system backup, a mirrored model, or even a cloud-based system for remote access.

• Alternative business location

  • If hardware and/or Internet access is destroyed at your primary business location, a secondary location is necessary. This could even include a full remote-work strategy.

• Type-specific loss strategies

  • Your plan should include recovery strategies specific to the type of loss, such as software, hardware, connectivity, or data access.

• Restoration

  • The sequence in which systems need to be restored should be defined based on the level of criticality.
  • More critical components should be brought back online first, while other components are restored soon after that.

Mitigating Risks

While natural disasters can’t be prevented, many man-made ones can be. Managed IT services providers like GSDSolutions can develop a proactive strategy to prevent data loss and theft along with system outages and failures. Working to minimize risks can help reduce the chances of needing to use your disaster recovery plan; however, it’s not a replacement.

You still need to prepare, just in case.

GSDSolutions provides expert  and throughout the Bay Area that reduces your risk and help you plan ahead for the worst-case scenario. We offer professional expertise using a predictable labor cost model to make it affordable for small and medium-sized businesses.

Want to Know More?

Give us a call at (650) 282-7695, drop us an email to us at getstuffdone@gsdsolutions.io, or click the button below to learn more about how we can help you develop a disaster recovery plan tailor-fit to your business.