When disaster strikes, it’s important to have a plan in place. Businesses specifically need an IT disaster recovery plan to make sure they have a way of recovering normal IT operations after a disaster.
Unsure of how to go about starting the disaster recovery process for your business? Here are a couple of tips.
- Know What You Have
The first step in any disaster recovery process is identifying the most important components of your business that could be affected by a disaster. These will be the things you need to protect. Identify any relevant network equipment, hardware, software, cloud services, and most importantly, your critical data.
- Risk Assessment
Once you know exactly what you have and need to protect, the next step of the disaster recovery process is risk assessment. A risk assessment is a simple tool for determining the major risks to your business. These could include digital threats like cyber attacks, natural disasters like floods or tornadoes, or any other disastrous situation that could compromise the technology your company uses.
Sit down with your team and think about any possible worst-case scenarios as part of the risk assessment. It’s important to consider the situation your specific organization is in. A financial institution, for example, might worry more about cyberattacks than hurricanes.
- Build Your Team
No one can complete the disaster recovery process alone. Now, it’s time to build your disaster recovery team. The first names on the list will be members of your IT team but don’t stop there. Vmware suggests going outside your IT team to include executive management for their input and approvals, and also a representative from each part of the business to address their concerns.
Planning and actually carrying out a disaster recovery truly a team effort
- Decide How to Keep Your Data Safe
The next step is incredibly important. It’s deciding how you’re going to keep your data safe. Some options include using a physical data center, using virtual machines to emulate your server environment, or using Draas (disaster recovery as a service). All of these options can be very effective. The right choice just depends on the specifics of your business.
- Write Your Actual Plan
You may have assessed your risks, put together a team, found out what assets you have to protect, and more, but now you need to write it all down. How?
You don’t have to start from scratch and make it up yourself. TechTarget has a convenient disaster recovery plan template. You can find it here to help you get started with your plan.
When you’re writing the plan, keep these tips in mind:
- Set clear goals
- Define the ways you’ll approach and meet those goals, step by step
- Discuss these steps directly with the people responsible for executing the disaster recovery plan (or alternative representatives, if they are not available)
These steps are just the tip of the iceberg of implementing a disaster recovery process. Luckily, experts in the field like 911 PC Help can help get you the rest of the way. Contact 911 PC Help if you want assistance with your business’ disaster recovery process.