By Chris Voigt, Xigent Solutions Architect
At some point, the worst is going to happen. In today’s digital world, one of the disasters you need to anticipate is losing access to your company’s data.
If you haven’t looked at your company’s backup and disaster recovery plan in a while, it’s probably time to revisit it. Your business objectives and day-to-day operations shift all the time. And you want a plan that will save business when the unthinkable happens.
Here are some pitfalls guaranteed to sink your disaster recovery process (and ways to avoid them):
- Don’t test your backup/recovery. One of the worst things you can do is to assume your disaster recovery plan works. If you don’t ever try to test your system by restoring an application, file or server, you don’t really know if you can or how long it will take to you back up and running. The best kind of test gives you real-world results but is conducted without having any impact on your day-to-day business.
- Fail to align your plan with your business objectives. You should do the math and decide what data is worth the most to your operations. How much data can you afford to lose? How long can your business run without recovering data? Any plan that doesn’t address these questions leaves you at risk of disappointing customers or losing business.
- Skimp on the data redundancy and monitoring. Without adequate recovery capabilities, you are at the mercy of ransomware attacks, power outages or equipment failure. You can prevent catastrophic loss with a backup/recovery solution that takes your data off premises/and or the cloud, with 24/7/365 monitoring.
- Skip the recovery plan documentation. Some companies create well-thought-out disaster recovery plans but rely on IT staff to remember it all. Make sure that you document your recovery process in written form, creating a detailed runbook and keep it updated. Your goal is to spell your plan out so clearly that someone who knows nothing about your IT systems could pick it up and easily execute it.
- Put it all on your IT team. On a daily basis, your IT staff has plenty to do. Getting a system back up and running after a disruption is difficult and time consuming. Outsourcing your testing, monitoring and recovery to a third-party service provider takes this complicated process off their plate. That frees them up to maintain your business infrastructure and cybersecurity.
- Paying too much for your coverage. Many businesses fail to assess their backup and disaster recovery plans for cost optimization. Take the time to make sure you have the right plan for backup and recovery and are getting a return on your investment with straightforward, flexible pricing with a known monthly cost.
If any of these pitfalls feel familiar to you, or you just want to learn more about your options for recovery, connect with one of our disaster recovery experts.
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