3 Ways to Protect Your Business from Disaster Now

There are an unimaginable number of ways your business could find itself in need of disaster recovery and business continuity. A single file server could fail, impacting anyone requiring access to the data on it. A summer storm could result in a lightning strike knocking out power to your entire business.  An employee could open an innocently-looking email, exposing your business to a virus ready to wreak havoc on your system.

Regardless of the size of the event, a plan that takes in to account mission critical business functions and the parties involved in supporting those functions is paramount to recovering.

Let’s assume an extended power outage occurs.

An exercise involving tasks related to a full disaster recovery and business continuity plan can be helpful in making your next power outage less impactful to your business.

1. Review your current data/server infrastructure backup
2. Review the status of your UPS (uninterruptable power supply) or generator solution.
3. Identify three mission critical tasks that would have to be addressed this month regardless of how long a power outage may exist.

Too often, today’s automated backup processes are taken for granted. A combination of “set it and forget it” backup capabilities and the daily challenges faced by today’s fast-paced IT support needs can cause us to push backup monitoring to the bottom of the list. Now is the time to dedicate effort to review backup jobs and their targets.

Here are some key items to review:

• Has anything changed in the environment to warrant a change in current backup jobs or the creation of new jobs to ensure new data or systems are protected?
• Have backup jobs been completing successfully?
• Is alerting configured properly to notify of backup job successes or failures?

It’s also highly recommended your business performs test restores at the file level, virtual machines level (if a virtualized environment) and bare metal restore if hardware is available.

In the event of a power failure, the ability to keep IT systems up and running for a period of time is a vital component of business continuity enabling production timelines to be met.

Here are some key items to review:

• Verify the age of any UPS and associated batteries and replace systems who have met their intended life cycle.
• Plan a self-test of associated UPS systems to verify functionality, run time and general health of the UPS and battery systems.
• Plan a self-test of any generator systems and any systems attached to the generator electrical grid