Things You Should Know About Disaster Recovery In 2016
As a business leader, you probably know a person or two whose businesses suffered a great deal after losing their data. Indeed, losing data can be a crippling occurrence in business. Therefore, it is not surprising that many business owners are either actively looking for disaster recovery solutions or already have a disaster recovery plan in place, sometimes even before disaster strikes. While some might see this as paranoia, available statistics show that most businesses are unprepared to deal with disaster. These business people who prepare for the unknown are probably the people the rest in the business community should be asking advice from. In any case, it has never hurt to be prepared.
Some of the challenges of disaster recovery include the fact that many misconceptions remain in the business community about what DR is and what it is not. Other business men and women assume that disaster preparedness is about signing up for it with a certain company and everything else falls into place. Sadly, they could not be more wrong. Therefore, we have listed some of the things you definitely should know about disaster recovery this year.
Disaster recovery goes beyond systems and data
The problem with thinking that disaster recovery only deals with systems and data is that many companies end up deciding to either go all in or entirely refrain from investing in DR. The right approach would be in prioritizing some applications ahead of others. Applications that connect you directly to your consumers should be given priority. Others that only deal with the internal systems of your business could be considered later. In other words, your disaster recovery plan should be based on the impact your systems and data would have on your business, with those that would be most devastating to your business operations getting preferred.
Data protection is a must and must be done properly
In today’s business world, you cannot choose whether or not to protect your data. You have a responsibility to your customers to keep their information safe. You also must keep your business information and secrets secure from those who would want to steal it and push you out of business. That is why backing up your business data should be a companywide policy. In addition, every time data backup is done, data backup verification must follow shortly after. There are times that systems fail leaving you thinking you have backed up only to later find your backup systems are empty. Truly, it has been found that data backup errors contribute up to 40% of data recovery failures. Your business should not have an acceptable amount of data that it can afford to lose. Even 10% could be too much.
Backing up your data will not be enough
While backing up might seem to work seamlessly when you are an individual with your laptop data backed up, the story takes a different path when you are dealing with a business enterprise. Firstly, your business has a number of computer technologies and infrastructure. That is why even though you may have been doing a good job doing backup, equal level of effort must be put into putting the data together again during recovery. Your recovery tools should therefore be recent and uptodate. This would ease the recovery process and ensure that your production environment continues running effectively in the post recovery period.