Businesses everywhere try to focus on what they need to do to succeed – hitting sales targets, growing and increasing revenue and having a knowledgeable workforce. An important, but often overlooked, component to success is having a plan in place for when things go wrong. Businesses in all industries need to develop strong business continuity and disaster recovery plans.
Often times, the topics of business continuity and disaster recovery are lumped together, but they are quite different. A disaster recovery plan focuses on access to the data that runs the business and documented processes to do so during an impactful event. A business continuity plan focuses on restoring business operations and the processes to do so during the impactful event.
What is an Impactful Event?
Businesses need to consider their location and industry when researching potential impactful events. Is your area prone for certain natural disasters (hurricanes, flooding and earthquakes to name a few)? Are you in a sector that is more likely to be targeted by a ransomware or malware attack? Each of these attacks impact a business in different ways.
An impactful event can take many forms that may include natural disasters, severe summer or winter storms, fire, flood, accidents, virus outbreaks and ransomware attacks. Each impacts a business in very different ways. With well-researched disaster recovery and business continuity plans, you can mitigate the impact to your business.
Disaster Recovery
A disaster recovery plan is a good starting point for protecting your business’s mission critical data. By starting here, we can accomplish a major required component: getting data and systems offsite. There are now automated solutions available that can send protected data and server replicas offsite. Manual methods of getting protected data to offsite locations are also available. By having backups of your mission critical data offsite, your backup data retension needs are met and serve replicas can be brought online in the event of an emergency at your business location. Setup can be accomplished in a matter of weeks while you continue the bigger lift of business continuity planning.
Business Continuity
To begin developing your business continuity plan, start identifying your mission critical systems and data. Next, determine how long business operations can tolerate those systems being down before severe damage is experienced by operational commitments and timelines. For example; a lightning strike could leave a business without power until the next day. A small manufacturing company may tolerate this impact to productivity until the next day. A healthcare organization will not be able to tolerate this lack of power due to their responsibility to provide continuous care to patients. In the same example, Human Resources may not be severely impacted by such a power event, but medical staff could not meet their responsibilities during this time. As seen in this example, different industries and different business units can have different needs for planning.
How We Can Help
Planning for disaster recovery and business continuity is a big undertaking that many larger organizations talk about, but may have trouble moving from the planning stages to implementation.
Ask yourself these questions to get started:
- What are the mission critical business systems and data?
- Who are the key stakeholders to participate in planning and developing processes?
- What kind of technology solutions do we need to compliment our plans?
Splashwire, a technology consulting and solutions company, can help your business establish or update a scalable disaster recovery solution, backed by 24/7/365 local support.
Our solutions include back-up and protection for operating systems, applications, configurations and data for physical and virtual environments. We have the technology solutions and the professional knowledge to kick off the discussion, add to an already successful plan or close the loop on a plan that just can’t seem to become an operational standard.
Contact us to us to learn more.