7 Tips For An Effective Disaster Data Recovery Solution

The current reliance on IT for many businesses means that if their network went down, they would not be able to function.

If this sounds like your business, it's important that you have a disaster recovery in place and ready to action, so you're fully prepared to get back up and running as quickly as possible in a worst-case scenario. If you don't already have one, here are ten tips to help you put an efficient disaster recovery plan together.

Identify Your Biggest Risks

Start your planning for disaster recovery solutions by pinpointing the most dangerous threats to your IT infrastructure, such as system failure, employee error, fire or loss of power. Identifying these will assist you in putting in place protocols that reduce the risk and decide the course of action to be taken in a disaster recovery situation. For instance, if fire is a serious risk, then it is quite evident that recovery needs to take place at a different premise.

Recover In A Sensible Order

In a recovery, you should still prioritise the order in which things should be done. What are the most business-critical services you require (customer records, email servers, phone lines) and in which order you need to restore them? Considering this first will help you build a strategy for recovery that has the least impact on your business.

As part of this process you should determine a Recovery Time Objective (RTO) for each piece of business-critical software or hardware. The RTO represents the maximum viable downtime for each system. So, this might be 5 minutes for your phone lines as they are extremely critical to communicate with customers, but for extensive business archives which are not used every day they may have an RTO of a week. The best advice for this step is to be realistic, it’s easy to start saying “everything is critical! The RTO should be 0” but in reality, there is limited time and resources and priorities must be decided.

Have Effective Backups

In addition to RTOs, the Recovery Point Objective ( RPO) is another aspect that has to be taken into account. Essentially, this refers to how much data the business is prepared to lose during a catastrophe.

Ensuring that you have your data backed up often enough to fulfil your RPO is a vital part of a disaster recovery plan. If you are an e-commerce business and do not want to risk all of your profits, the last moment your site was online would also have to be your recovery point. In this case, for your recovery to achieve its goals, you would need a continuous backup in operation.

Create a disaster response team

Creating an effective disaster recovery team is essential to carrying out a successful disaster recovery. Just as your business hopefully has a first aid officer and a designated fire marshal you should have digital equivalents to deal with the tasks required in a disaster recovery situation.

Your disaster recovery team may include a mixture of in-house staff and third-party suppliers for services like off-premises backups and just as every system needs a backup, every person does too, what happens if disaster strikes when a key member of the recovery team is on holiday?

Have a written plan

Your workers are under pressure when a disaster happens to get your system back up and running quickly. You have numerous employees, each with their own agendas, all attempting to fulfil their duties simultaneously. It can be difficult for team members to interact efficiently with each other in these challenging situations and often they forget that what they do has to fit into the process. A well written and easy to understand process will bring you back to square one if anything is done out of order.

Test your recovery plan

Just like a fire drill, a full disaster recovery plan should be tested as a whole regularly as well as testing the individual components of it.

Use Virtualisation Where Possible

Using virtual machines, such as VMware, for your device backup can provide a much simpler solution for disaster recovery than relying on physical servers, since virtual machines are capable of restarting an application on alternative hardware automatically without any loss of data or availability.

These are 7 key points to help build an effective disaster recovery plan but every business’s plans will differ. The best way approach to planning for disaster recovery is to consult with a managed IT service provider who will help you not only to plan for disaster recovery but also help you put your plan in to action should it ever be required.