Disaster Recovery: What are you overlooking?
by Chrystal Chambers and Jeff Vahrenwald, Kraft Enterprise SystemsAs the recent flooding in Middle Tennessee has illustrated, no business is immune to a disaster that prevents it from continuing normal operations. And while structural damage can be repaired, loss of data is often irrecoverable and can erase months of hard work. Planning for such scenarios can reduce your company’s risk as well as limit the impact should the worst occur. Here are three of the most often overlooked areas of disaster recovery planning:
Conducting a Risk Assessment
A disaster recovery plan is only as good as the risk assessment on which it is based. The formation of a plan should start by asking what risks might harm your systems and what the likelihood of those risks is.
Next, a good risk assessment should identify a business’ most critical processes and systems, giving consideration to availability requirements, the cost impact of any failure to meet with those availability requirements, and whether or not there are any inter-system dependencies. Once a system hierarchy is established, a disaster recovery plan can be created that focuses first on the most critical processes and systems.
Offsite Storage—Where and How to Backup your Data
One of the most fundamental aspects of data loss prevention is offsite storage and the premise behind it is simple—you store a copy of your data remotely so that a local disaster does not result in a complete loss of data. Offsite storage is fairly common but many companies, especially small- and mid-market companies, do not invest in this preventative measure, leaving them vulnerable to data loss due to disaster.
The options for offsite storage are many and the cost for storage depends on each type’s operational readiness. A storage system that ensures 100-percent availability will cost more than a system that, for example, must be delivered to your location to restore operations. Regardless, your disaster recovery plan should examine the ease and speed with which backups can be restored back into the production environment.
The final critical aspect of offsite storage is selecting a storage site in a different geographic area that is unlikely to be negatively affected by the same disaster as the organization’s primary site.
Monthly Preventative Maintenance Probably the most often overlooked measure of reducing data loss risk is performing monthly maintenance. The improvement of security policies is not a "set it and forget it" procedure. With new software additions and regular staff turnover, regularly updating you disaster recovery plan and assessing its efficacy is vital to mitigating the effects of a disaster. Additionally, regular checkups can ensure that data is getting backed up correctly.
Our data protection services include the formation of a comprehensive risk assessment plan and disaster recovery plan as well as regular preventative maintenance checks.
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