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Disaster preparedness should be a crucial part of your business plan. To maximize preparedness, your business should develop different plans that deal with different types of disasters. Each plan should be specific and take into account the different types of disasters you may encounter.
It’s important to remember that everyday scenarios, such as a faulty sprinkler in your server room, power outages or an overheating server, can send your business into a tailspin as easily as the largest natural disaster. Your disaster preparation plan should account for everything from the commonplace to the catastrophic.
Formulate a business continuity plan
A business continuity plan takes into consideration all of the factors that enable you to operate during and after a disaster. To determine your needs for continuity, you should identify your mission-critical applications and determine your recovery goal, all within what your budget allows.
Your continuity plan should encompass recovery from both large-scale natural disasters and routine events. Here are some tips to help you plan and provide for data accessibility, power availability and telecom needs.
Define your operational scope
How long can your business continue, both physically and financially, during a significant loss of service? If you’ve got large cash reserves or previously distributed goods, you can probably withstand longer downtimes. But service companies that operate on a cash basis will see an immediate impact on profits as each hour of a shutdown crawls by. As a general rule, your investment in business continuity products and services should be proportionally higher if you have a short window of risk tolerance.
Back up your backups
The importance of data backups cannot be stressed enough. Perform regular backups. Then store those backup disks or tapes offsite. Your backup site needs to be located far enough away from your primary site to limit the possibility of both sites being affected by the same disaster. And be sure that any backup disks stored offsite are encrypted to fully protect sensitive company information.
Consider continuous data protection (CDP)
To protect data and ensure speedy recovery times, many businesses are turning to continuous data protection (CDP) or near-CDP backups. CDP eliminates lengthy backups by backing up only data that’s changed since the last backup. With CDP, the window of potential loss can be reduced from
the length of your current backup interval to less than one minute. CDP is available as a software package that you install across your network or as a service through various IT providers.
CDP technology:
- Automatically saves every change to data in real time
- Allows you to restore data much more quickly than traditional tape-based backup
- Saves changes across servers, desktops and networked notebooks
- Ensures data integrity and security
- Allows you to restore data to a specific point in time
- Complements existing backup and storage procedures
Maintain power
When a power outage occurs, rely on an uninterruptible power supply (UPS) system to protect your equipment from power surges and provide battery backup for a short amount of time. UPS plays a vital role in data protection by allowing you to save data and properly shut down equipment after a power failure.
Devise a communication strategy
Clearly outline a post-disaster communication strategy that includes alternative phone and e-mail addresses for every employee. After a disaster, call levels into the area are high, and systems are often overloaded, further complicating communication. Be prepared to deal with clogged telecom systems.
Test your plan
The best-laid plans can fail miserably if they’re not tested on a regular basis. You should test your business-continuity plan every six months to ensure that it works as desired. Make sure employees know where to report, how to reach key contacts and exactly what their responsibilities are in a disaster situation.
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Tandberg Data
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