Ensure Business Continuity in the Face of Disaster

Most disasters strike when you least expect them. Some – like hurricanes – give you more warning. But in either case, it’s a real problem if disaster brings your business to a grinding halt. Forces of nature, malicious acts, or even a simple mistake can have a long-lasting negative effect on your business. 

Below we have included a snippet of what you will find in our white paper "Building higher IT business continuity in the face of disaster". This white paper offers some first steps and follow-up steps your business can take to upgrade your backup and disaster recovery preparedness.

How will data loss affect your Organization?

• Revenue loss from the inability to conduct business
• Lost customer trust or confidence
• Financial penalties for violated SLAs
• Legal or financial penalties for compliance lapses
• Excessive recovery and repair costs for lost systems and data

Hours to Recover? Better if you can do it in a Half Hour or Less

• High availability
• Onsite recovery
• Offsite or cloud recovery

First Steps to Move to a Stronger DR Position

What’s your best path to a stronger DR plan? Here are first steps for small and medium-size businesses as well as small enterprises:

• Take a quick inventory of all your IT related business processes. This includes everything from financial applications, logistical functions, email, outward-facing functions and more. 
• Rank them for recovery priority. Think about which applications are necessary for your company to generate revenue or are critical to business continuity? What data can’t your customers do without? What’s critical to running your internal accounting and finances? And what is required for compliance? With those variables in mind. Now, create a list in descending order to establish your DR recovery sequence.
• Establish a Recovery Time Objective (RTO) for each function. Ask yourself, “How fast do I need to recover this application?” Email and transaction-based applications that people inside and outside the company depend on at all times will probably be near the top of this list, whereas applications that are less frequently accessed, such as a human resources applications, may be low on the list because they’re ancillary to your immediate business continuity requirements.
• Establish a Recovery Point Objective (RPO). How much data can you afford to lose for business process? How important is the data that you could lose? Applications related directly to business continuity, where data changes significantly every day, will top this list. Back office processes may be lower on the list.
• Create a “Break Glass in Case of Emergency” plan. Define where you want to keep your DR data and systems. If you are located in an area that could be hit with regional weather events like hurricanes, floods, or wild fires, then select a secondary location outside of your region that you can fail over to when disaster
  strikes at your primary location. Your choice could include cloud-based recovery

Next Steps to Increase your DR Responsiveness

• Determine which of your RTOs and RPOs can be supported by your existing backup and recovery scheme
• Consider your DR options
• Assign responsibilities so everyone knows what to do when a disaster strikes
• Test, test, test!
• Practice, practice, practice!

Reviewing your Backup Product for DR Suitability

• Legacy backup schemes are hard pressed to keep up
• Image-level backups a key beginning point to faster recoveries
• Recovering hybrid environments
• Recovering from a distance

We hope you enjoyed a small piece of the content that you will receive by signing in or completing the form on the right. You will receive access to the rest of this content and many other resources. You can also learn more about steps to ensure business continuity and disaster recovery as well as the suite of business backup solutions Quest has to offer.