IT failures happen more often than you’d think, and with one server going down or a simple glitch in the system, you would be looking at thousands of dollars in revenue lost just like that. It’s very important to prepare for such setbacks because otherwise, by the time the dust settles, you will be left far behind in the race while your competitors succeed. IT disasters can happen for multiple reasons; it could just be equipment failure, a server being fried due to bad temperature management, or a strong cyberattack from a terrorist or competitor group. In any case, preparing for the impact and avoiding it is your best call. If you’re wondering where to get started, read on to find out.
Conduct a Thorough Business Analysis
Before you end up preparing for how not to lose your revenue to an IT glitch or crisis, the first step would be determining what assets are at risk, what the damage looks like, and including all the potential threats in your analysis. Essentially, you’re looking at a way to figure out all the possibilities that could lead to your company getting hurt, but because of an IT failure or breach. You will also end up determining the key dependencies in the system and how cause-and-effect could topple the whole operation down. Once you have done the analysis, come up with two figures: your recovery time objective and your recovery point objective. RTO defines the amount of time you must not exceed to get your company back on its feet, while RPO tells you the maximum amount of data loss your company can tolerate and stay afloat.
Create The Plan
Once you’re done with your little fact-finding mission, your goal should be drafting a clear and thorough recovery plan for the company’s business continuity. You can consider hiring a risk-management company for incident response services as well. The plan should describe in detail all the steps the operations team will have to take to ensure the business is running smoothly. It should also outline the training measures that will be taken to prepare the human resources at your company for a potential breach. This way, when the travesty hits, your team would be prepared to take it on like a champ. On top of it, you need to gather your A players from all the relevant departments like operations, IT, and outreach to make a conclusive team that will take charge in the event of a disaster. Think of it like your own little SWOT team ready to counter the threat.
Gather The Backup
The next step is putting together a backup system where you’re going to store all your data. While it is encouraged to have your data on secure servers in the cloud, it is best if you have multiple storage options. Think about installing an on-site hard drive-based backup that can be immediately accessed in the event of a breach or if your cloud server goes down. But if your business faces a disaster on site, natural or accidental, the double-layered protection from the data uploaded on the cloud can be accessed immediately to get the system up and running again. The idea is to ensure that one way or another, your data remains safe and accessible in case of a breach.
Test Drills Are a Must
Your plan is in place, your backup is ready on all fronts, but how would you know if the company’s operations are going to run as smoothly as you thought? Organize these drills with your company to check if they will actually work in emergencies. Try them out once a month or every two months, even. And keep in mind your disaster recovery plan is not supposed to remain static over the years; it is supposed to evolve as new threats rear their heads or new technology comes in that safeguards databases against cyberattacks.
Conclusion
Planning your disaster recovery strategy is not an easy task, but you can always rely on a disaster recovery service to put together a framework for you. Just keep the checklist given above in mind when you explain to them what your vision of a disaster recovery plan for your company looks like.
