4 Steps to a Successful Backup & Disaster Recovery Plan
1. Make Sure You Have a Plan
The case for backup and disaster recovery planning is straightforward: most small businesses cannot survive even one data breach, yet security experts warn us that becoming a victim of cybercrime is not a matter of “if,” but “when. It’s hard to imagine a more compelling case for disaster recovery planning than this reality, yet 68% of small businesses have no written disaster recovery plan at all. Among those that have them, many are dated or inadequate. So, you’ll not only be able to sleep better at night with a plan in place, you’ll also be ahead of the pack – and more prepared than most of your competitors for disasters natural and manmade alike.
2. Get Expert Help
Get help from experts that spend their days helping companies likes yours. Professionals like those on our team can deliver turnkey expertise to your company, including:
- Walking through your disaster recovery planning process, ensuring that your plan incorporates best practices, so it’s robust, practical and tailored to your company
- Identifying and securing bids (often with access to off-book rates) from best-in-breed solutions for your company’s backup and recovery plans
- Finding savings opportunities in other technology services that can help you underwrite your backup and recovery plans
- Managing service provisioning and ongoing maintenance, so you can focus on growing your business
3. Make Your Plan About Recovery
Don’t get caught in the data-backup-only trap! Many firms use cloud-based solutions for offsite data storage and backup but have not mapped out how they would access that data to restore – or even to maintain – operations during an extended on-site outage due to an unforeseen event. By focusing on what you need for recovery, your backup needs will become clear.
Similarly, if your firm leverages cloud communications and other IT-as-a-service solutions for as much of its operations as possible (and it should … check out Step 4), your focus may need to lean more heavily toward business continuity needs and solutions like SD-WAN with failover, network redundancy and diversification options. You might, for example, be best served by implementing a fixed wireless solution that augments your wireline or fiber bandwidth solution during normal operations, but can become your lifeline when those traditional connections fail.
In either case, your plan should focus first on what your company would need if its current operations or infrastructure failed – for any reason – and determine your backup needs from there.
4. Fight Fire With Fire
Today, external threats to your business are greater in both scope and scale than they have ever been. Storms are more powerful and more frequent, as are floods, mudslides and wildfires. And on the tech front, cyberthreats are evolving at hyper speed.
In order to combat these challenges, you need infrastructure and technology services that evolve as fast as these threats. This means leveraging cloud and managed IT services as much as possible, so an on-site outage doesn’t take down your company’s ability to operate. These services deliver protection to your company on two fronts:
- First, they are constantly updated so you’re never lagging behind in security, automatic backup and restoration abilities, enhanced features and a host of other benefits.
- Second, since they’re sourced from the cloud instead of computers in your offices, they can keep your company up and running when on-site infrastructure fails.
Communications, file storage, collaboration, invoicing and accounting records, CRMs, project management and other mission-critical solutions all can be sourced from cloud-based providers that can help you weather any storm that comes your way.
Be sure to check out these services when you’re evaluating your backup and recovery needs. You’ll find that many of your business continuity and disaster recovery challenges can be solved with some simple changes in how you source your solutions.
