There’s nothing anyone can do to change the fact that, unfortunately, disasters happen. But, that doesn’t mean that your business can’t do its best to be prepared. How can your IT organization protect your physical and digital assets? Enter disaster recovery.
What is Disaster Recovery and How Can it Help Your Business?
Disaster recovery is basically a professional term for planning for the worst. According to VMware, “disaster recovery is an organization’s method of regaining access and functionality to its IT infrastructure after events like a natural disaster, cyber attack, or even business disruptions related to the COVID-19 pandemic.”
It is actually often talked about as a subset of business continuity. What’s business continuity? The BCI describes it like this: “Business continuity is about having a plan to deal with difficult situations, so your organization can continue to function with as little disruption as possible.”
They describe a key example that your wider organization may have experienced: if you rely on one raw materials supplier and they go out of business what do you do? You need to have a plan in place in case changes happen.
In terms of what exactly disaster recovery looks like in practice, It takes the form of a plan, a written document with the things you need to do if a disaster occurs/people you need to contact.
Key Parts of Disaster Recovery Plan – RPO and RTO
There are two essential components to any disaster recovery plan: the RPO and the RTO.
The recovery point objective, or RPO, is all about your business’ data. Specifically, it refers to the amount of data your business is willing to lose in the event of a disaster. For example, if your company could only tolerate losing a day’s worth of data, then you need to back up your data at least once a day.
The recovery time objective, a.k.a. RTO, refers to the amount of time that your business’ technology can be down and out of service before that downtime has significant negative effects on your business. If being out of service for six hours will cause unacceptable impacts to your business continuity, for example, then you need to be able to get back up and running within six hours. Your business, in this case, has a strict six-hour window for returning to operations after the disaster.
Benefits of Disaster Recovery
Other than having a document to go off over when you’re in crisis, here are other benefits including:
- It’s a great way to help your customers. In other words, it’s simply a part of good customer service. If your systems get back up quickly after a disaster, then your customers can get back to work more quickly. They will be grateful for your disaster recovery plan!
- Some industries like health or financial services are also subject to compliance regulations. In those cases, having a disaster recovery plan is a way to help get on top of things.
- Another benefit of disaster recovery is that it can lead to other improvements in your business. In the process of creating the disaster recovery plan, you’ll be looking for the best way to protect your company and get it back up and running. That can lead to discoveries about new ways to streamline your business.
Don’t wait until disaster strikes. Contact 911 PC Help today for help with your business continuity plan.