After a quiet season, Hurricane Ian roared into Florida, reminding everyone that business disruption can be highly unpredictable—and severe—and technology-dependent organizations (that is, all of us) can never rest when it comes to the need for data backup and disaster recovery planning.
That’s why we encourage business leaders to ask seven critical questions when prepping for future disasters—whether they come in the form of natural catastrophes, pandemics or cybercrimes:
- Is there a disaster recovery solution in place, supported by company policies and procedures?
- Do you trust that solution? How did it perform in the past?
- How often is the solution tested? How about the policies and procedures surrounding it?
- How long is the anticipated time to recovery?
- How long can your business tolerate downtime? Minutes? Hours? Days?
- How much will a minute, hour or day of downtime cost your business?
- How fast can you access off-site backups? And how fresh will they be?
Equipped with answers to those seven questions, we recommend following a six-step process in the wake of disaster:
- Assess the problem: How many systems affected? How much data lost?
- Establish recovery goals: What’s an achievable day and time objective?
- Select recovery path: Which systems come first?
- Confirm functionality: What’s working where for whom?
- Complete restoration: There’s more than one path to full recovery.
- Assess afterwards: Review, revise and refine for next time.
These questions and recovery steps are just a start, however. Data backup and disaster recovery is the pivotal point of business continuity planning (BCP), but there are many related technology issues to consider in prepping for the next business disruption. Call us to delve deeper into these recommendations.