Disasters come in all shapes and sizes. It could, for example, be a cyberattack that takes your website out of the game, an equipment failure that stops your process in its tracks, or a flood that renders your office uninhabitable. Indeed, there’s any number of scenarios that can hit your business hard.
Increasingly, organisations are taking steps to prepare for everything from natural disasters to cyberattacks by putting a disaster recovery plan in place. Essentially, a disaster recovery details the roles and responsibilities, and planning and process that must take place for a business to be able to resume its mission-critical activities as quickly as possible.
In this article, we’ll look at why disaster recovery planning and cloud-based disaster recovery should become a top priority for your business.
WHAT IS BUSINESS CONTINUITY?
The term ‘business continuity’ is often associated with disaster recovery planning. However, the two aren’t necessarily interchangeable. While disaster recovery is associated more with overcoming and repairing the initial problem, business continuity focuses on all the aspects of keeping the business running despite the disaster.
Business continuity is all about planning to deal with difficult situations. This way, your business or organisation can continue to function with as little disruption as possible. A good plan will identify the potential threats to the organisation and analyse the likely impact they’ll have on day-to-day process operations. It’ll then provide a way to mitigate the threats and put a framework in place during disaster recovery to allow key functions of the business to continue.
WHY IS DISASTER RECOVERY IMPORTANT FOR BUSINESSES?
Here are three reasons why it’s so important for businesses to put a disaster recovery plan in place…
1. You’re only as strong as your weakest link
It’s an age-old adage, but it’s just as relevant today. No business is immune to systems and IT disasters. Furthermore, no matter how sophisticated your defences might be, if you have weak links in your team or your technology and you have failed to prepare by planning, then you’re still vulnerable and the challenge can be hard to overcome. The good news is there are many things you can do to prevent IT disasters and recover quickly.
Even the most cautious and diligent employees make mistakes, even with experience. Hence, requirements for planning for disaster recovery and creating a series of incremental online data and storage backups to let you restore files to an error-free state is a must. In terms of the technology, using cloud storage, and placing your production servers in a top-tier data centre with no single point of failure on power or network connections is an excellent starting point and should be among the priorities. It’s also advisable to locate your disaster recovery servers at another data centre in a different geographic area.
2. No hardware is failure-proof
It doesn’t matter how confident you are in your technology. No devices or hardware are completely resistant to hard disk or internet connections failures. Of course, it can be costly to eliminate a single point of failure. However, putting a disaster recovery plan in place is the only way to ensure a hardware failure does not disrupt business operations or cause data storage loss. With this in mind, outsourcing to a disaster recovery service provider can eliminate much of the capital expense. It can also help to ensure the strictest protection from infrastructure failures is put in place. Alternatively, knowing where you can turn to quickly replace hardware with relevant images, software loaded and data replication can help get key personnel back up to speed fast. Perhaps adding a cloud-based disaster recovery plan will add to your preparedness. Having a recovery strategy like this will allow your business to continue operating despite the unplanned disaster recovery and assure your clients or customers that you and your facility are ok.
3. Floods and fires can strike at any time
Floods, fires or other property issues can strike indiscriminately. Obviously, these can have a devastating impact on your mission-critical operations. They can potentially displace your team for weeks and even months at a time with an environment outage or power outages. For this type of worst-case scenario, it pays to have a business continuity operation process and recovery planning in place. The operation should mirror your day-to-day operations and allow you to reload software, maintain secure communication with clients, vendors and other vital contacts during and after disaster recovery.
Temporary office setups can be a cost-effective solution. Renting the office equipment you need, such as desktop computers, laptops, printers and iMacs, can ensure you’re ready to go before you set foot in a new office. The result is no downtime and a significant reduction in capital expenditure.
WE CAN BECOME AN IMPORTANT PART OF YOUR DISASTER RECOVERY PLAN
Disaster recovery is so important for businesses. Therefore, it pays to put the necessary precautions in place. At Hire Intelligence, our short-term and long-term rental service, combined with our ability to backup and restore, load company-specific images and software onto devices, and our usage of the cloud platform and offsite backup enables us to become an essential part of your disaster plan. We allow you to rent the essential and preconfigured technology you need to get back on your feet. Take a look at our range of solutions and get a quick quote today.
Photo by CASPER RUBIN
