A Good Disaster Recovery Strategy Can Save Your Business
There are countless ways your organization could face down a disaster, whether it’s a high-profile natural disaster, a physical disaster, or a technology-related disaster. If you aren’t prepared to face the consequences, your business could falter in the face of such incidents. How can your business best prepare itself for all manners of disasters?
Disaster Recovery Is a Big Issue
There are two ways to approach a disaster: reactive and proactive. The reactive approach involves the mindset that you cannot prevent the disaster; therefore, there is no reason to try, as you will experience the consequences anyway. The other mindset, proactive, subscribes to the idea that you can be ready for a disaster and can mitigate the damages ahead of time with the right amount of preparation.
In just about all situations, it’s better to be proactive than reactive, especially in the case of disaster recovery. Due to the nature of the situations, you never know if and when they will strike, so you had best be prepared to handle natural disasters, physical disasters, and technology disasters. Let’s go over them.
Natural Disasters
A natural disaster is usually what people think of when they think of disasters, and they include situations like fires, floods, hurricanes, tornadoes, blizzards, and so on. You could even put a pandemic in this category. While the severity might vary, there can be no denying that these situations can impact operations. You need to have a plan to address unexpected weather and illness for your business; the continuity of operations hangs precariously in the balance.
Physical Disasters
A physical disaster has to do with the physical infrastructure of your company, which might include your building, its utilities, physical security breaches, or theft. Examples include burst pipes, HVAC system errors, and power failures. While it might not seem like a massive loss, you can be sure that the accumulated downtime will be costly enough to make you wish you had a contingency plan in place.
Technology Disasters
Technology disasters are the result of technology failures, including the components of systems, as well as cybersecurity breaches. These are the most likely issues you will deal with regarding your hardware, and it will inevitably fail with enough wear and tear. Furthermore, they require a very specific skill set and expertise to maintain. Technology-related disasters like data loss and cyberattacks can both be prepared for, so it’s your responsibility to do so.
How to Go About Planning for the Worst
The general goal of a disaster recovery plan is to reduce downtime and get back to business as usual as quickly as possible. The devil is in the details, here; you need to know exactly what must be done, including metrics and benchmarks you want to hit, in order to successfully prepare for a disaster incident. There are certain things you’ll need regardless of the situation, though, such as data backed up both on and off-site. With the appropriate preparation, you can ensure that these situations don’t derail your operations.
Point North Networks can help you build out a disaster recovery plan and test it periodically to ensure your business can recover without a hitch. To learn more, reach out to us at 651-234-0895.
What You Need to Know to Get Through a Data Disaster
A disaster recovery plan is a strategy that allows a business to return to normal after a disruption of some type. Some data disasters are brought on by outside attacks, some are the result of a natural disaster or environmental issue, and some are simply a return to normal after an internal problem interferes with business operations. Today, we’ll take a look at a few things you need to know about disaster recovery to help you mitigate the negative effects of a data disaster.
In IT, disaster recovery is focused on the safeguarding of data and information systems, but for the business it is a wholesale strategy that protects a business’ ability to function after it has dealt with an often avoidable issue. With companies now dealing with much more data than ever before, as well as customers who don’t respond positively to data breaches or downtime, having a comprehensive disaster recovery platform in place is essential to getting through tough situations that may affect your business. Let’s take a look at three things you need to know to properly manage your disaster recovery plan.
Planning is Imperative
The first misconception that most people have about disaster recovery is that it is a massively complex strategy that has a lot of moving parts that need to be handled before you can go on business-as-usual. This isn’t the case. For most smaller businesses, it could simply be a strategy highlighted by a comprehensive data backup and recovery plan. As organizations get larger, however, more detail will be necessary about how to recover systems, applications, and working conditions.
Regardless of what type of organization you run, you need to understand that if you are enacting your disaster recovery plan, there are some serious issues that are affecting your business and you need to confront them head-on. Planning out scenarios can help your team be ready to do what needs to be done to get your business back up and running fast after a disaster. You will need to know how your backup system works, who is in charge of the different parts of your DR platform, and set a responsible recovery point objective (RPO) and recovery time objective (RTO) to pinpoint how far back your recovery needs to go to get stable applications and data back and how much time you have to get that done.
Test Your DR
One of the biggest problems organizations have with their disaster recovery platform is that they haven’t tested it. In fact, nearly a quarter of businesses have never tested their disaster recovery plan. Failure to test opens up a litany of issues, including the DR platform falling on its face and leaving your organization clutching at straws. You don’t have to test the platform monthly, or even quarterly, but ensuring that your DR platform is tested at least once a year can help you avoid a lot of would-be headaches.
Since testing your DR strategy can disrupt your business and cut into productivity, some business leaders won’t want you to do it. It’s this reason that IT administrators have to push back and ensure that the system is tested at least once annually. Any time you test any system, you will inevitably find problems with it. It stands to reason that your DR strategy will have some issues, but every test provides an opportunity to fix problems. As a result, updating the DR plan with lessons you’ve learned during testing will be invaluable if the real thing needs to be enacted.
The Human Element
You may think of your disaster recovery strategy as an IT issue, but your entire DR platform is handled by humans. A comprehensive DR strategy has to include contingencies for employees. For instance, if your business’ location is compromised for whatever reason, do you have the ability to get them access to company data they need to do their jobs?
Take the COVID-19 pandemic for instance. Not many businesses had “global pandemic” on a list of their DR contingencies and it cost many organizations greatly. With governments handing down shelter-in-place mandates in the early part of the pandemic, many businesses had to invest a lot of capital, often capital they didn’t have, to ensure that their businesses could continue. Regardless of what you do with your technology, businesses are mostly human endeavors and ensuring that your policies cover eventualities like work-from-home strategies can make all the difference between being profitable and closing up shop.
Don’t get caught in-between. If you would like to have a conversation about business continuity or disaster recovery with our IT experts at Point North Networks, Inc., reach out to us today at 651-234-0895.
Top 10 Reasons to back up data
A good business owner envisions the future and what it could bring about. You may have already devoted a considerable amount of time to the good things that could happen, but how often do you picture the bad?
If you don’t imagine the worst-case scenario, you could be putting your business on the line. Are you prepared to deal with data loss or data corruption?
Data backup and disaster recovery are critical components of any successful business. Most companies rely on data in at least some capacity, so without it, operations can be stymied significantly. This is reason enough for you to have backup data. However, there are several other reasons for data backups. Here are the most important ones.
Why You Should Have a Data Backup Plan
Data backup is extremely important in today’s digital world where cyber threats are increasingly becoming a menace. As Morgan Stanley describes it, “Backing up data refers to the process of making a copy of the information typically stored on your desktop or laptop computer, smartphone or tablet.”
Loss of data could happen due to human error, accidental deletion (68% of businesses report this as the main reason for data loss), natural disasters, malicious attacks, external hard drive failure or another hardware failure, or stolen or lost devices. Data backups on a regular basis are one of the best practices all businesses must follow.
As the IT world evolves, so does the need to have backups on different devices including mobile devices or your desktop system.
Prevention from data loss
Preventing loss of data is the main reason to have a data backup. Having data backups will ensure that you are able to recover your lost data easily and continue your business operations. As most businesses now operate digitally, the importance of data has never been so crucial. And making sure that have a proper data backup plan will only ensure that your business doesn’t face any obstacles.
Competitive edge
In case of data loss, your business might come to a standstill and other, more prepared businesses will be able to take advantage of this situation. However, if you have data backups, you will be able to continue with your business as usual.
Reduced downtime
Research shows that 42% of companies faced major downtime due to loss of data. Having data backup will reduce the time spent looking for lost information. By creating a proper backup system, you will ensure that your productivity is not hampered.
A must for a disaster recovery plan
A disaster recovery plan is a set of policies and procedures you follow during a disaster. Data backup is one of the most important components of this plan as it allows businesses to get back to work without disruptions.
Having an archive
Many businesses rely on past data for present and future operations. Data backup enables them to create an archive that can be dug into to find important data whenever the need arises.
Fast recovery
Cyber threats like malicious email links, etc can result in data loss. Data backup will ensure that you can restore things before all is lost.
Reduce unwanted work
Reports indicate that more than 41% of companies face reduced productivity due to data inaccessibility. Data backups mean you can quickly find deleted files and reduce the unwanted work of searching for data haphazardly.
Better auditing
Audits are an important part of every business life cycle. With proper data backup, you can ensure that all financial, accounting or other regulatory information is available readily, making audits a breeze.
Annual reporting
Annual reports require data for the entire year or even more. Data backup will ensure that you have access to it, helping you create more detailed annual reports.
Peace of mind
With proper data backup, you can enjoy peace of mind as you will not have to worry about loss of data and how you will tackle the situation.
Disaster Recovery Process
The process of such recovery is just as important, as without it, you cannot get back into business following the loss of business-critical data. You must enable actions like incremental backup and differential backup to ensure things are fine.
This is what enables your business to maintain operations even in the face of severe disasters, like a hacking incident or a natural disaster.
While having data backup is helpful, you still need a method that ensures a quick recovery time to avoid downtime. You might consider concepts like data backup, operations, workforce longevity, and alternative working conditions when putting together your recovery plan, whether the disaster is from nature or your fellow humankind.
Your business should implement a cloud-based data backup system for increased storage capacity and a recovery tool that takes periodic snapshots of your data. Storing data on Cloud will allow you to accomplish the following:
- Data backup can be taken throughout the workday rather than only once at the end of the day.
- Cloud makes backups accessible at a moment’s notice, something which is incredibly valuable when recovering from a disaster.
When your company is under pressure from a disaster, time is critical. You don’t want to be worrying about how and when to restore your data. It helps to just have the cloud take care of these processes for you.
Other Data backup best practices
Now that you are familiar with the importance of data backup, let’s look at the ones that will allow you to save your data better and provide you with a competitive advantage.
- Always take full backups of your data
- Keep the backup of original data easily accessible
- Follow the 3-2-1 rule
- Make storing backup information on the cloud or Google Drive a habit
- Keep a check on your stored data and the last full backup
- Perform backups – full backups, differential backups and incremental backups regularly
How Point North Can Help with Backups
Start taking your data backup and disaster recovery seriously before you suffer from a situation that could easily have been prevented. Alternatively, partner with a data backup solution provider like Point North.
We enable a host of services to both large and small businesses including incremental backups, differential backups, backup services, saving backups, Cloud Services like cloud storage, full backup services, regular backups, and a lot more.
To learn more about how you can take advantage of enterprise-level data backup and disaster recovery solutions, reach out to Point North Networks, Inc., at 651-234-0895.
Frequently Asked Questions About Data Backup
Why is data backup important?
Businesses today deal with heaps of data. Most of their operations and a majority of their success depend on the data they store. If this data is lost, businesses will get crippled and will take a long time to get back to action. However, data backup can prevent this situation and have them back running in case of a loss of data.
How data backup helps businesses?
It is a process that gives businesses a competitive advantage, reduces downtime, provides an archive, allows faster recovery, reduces workload in finding the right data, enables better auditing and annual reporting and gives absolute peace of mind.
Why is it a good idea to hire a data backup service provider?
Dealing with data is a critical function and you just can’t afford to go wrong there. Having a professional partner will ensure that your data is stored safely on Cloud or remote location and that the process of data storing is followed meticulously.
