Data Loss Can Put a Damper on Your Business Continuity Plan

You always hear about IT professionals discussing the importance of data backup. Why? Because it’s one of the single most-important processes you can integrate into your business continuity plan. While all managed services present a value to your business, only the Backup and Disaster Recovery (BDR) solution is capable of restoring data that has been lost thanks to unexpected hardware failures or natural disasters.

Regardless of how your hardware meets its untimely demise, a BDR solution can provide you with the means to quickly recover your backed-up data. It never hurts to be prepared, especially in a world where data loss can occur in an instant. Your business depends on data backup and recovery in order to function without fear.

The data backup process, which makes carbon copies of your data and transports it to an off-site location to increase redundancy, is a fairly old one which is simple to understand. While data backup is a term used fairly loosely, recovery is one which some professionals have trouble grasping. Why is data recovery such a difficult term to understand? You must first assess the issue at hand. Does it necessarily take a disaster for data recovery to be a useful investment?

In this instance, the term “disaster,” is one used to describe an event which interrupts day-to-day operations of your business. The potential disruption of your business’s productivity is why you integrate a recovery solution. This is why it’s important to take into account multiple modes of data destruction when formulating how best to protect your business’s information. If you don’t take multiple scenarios into account, you might be left high and dry when you need to recover your data in a pinch. If you think that losing your files is annoying, choosing which files need to be backed can also be a nightmare. Therefore, a comprehensive data recovery plan is required in order to allow for maximum efficiency and security.

Like any good plan, it’s important to have clear and concise steps in order to optimize efficiency. After deciding what data is absolutely necessary, you can start planning out your actual recovery policy. The top priority of your recovery plan is exactly what it sounds like; to help your business recover in the event a disaster makes operations impossible. This means moving any mission-critical applications or data to a functional server, which allows your business’s operations to continue while experiencing minimum downtime.

The location of your data following a disaster is called the Disaster Recovery Site. From here, it’s possible to operate your business until normal operations can resume, or the hardware lost during the disaster is replaced. In order to understand how much recovery time you’re talking about, you need to take several variables into account. One is the Business Impact Analysis (BIA), where you examine which drives, files, and systems are absolutely necessary for your company’s continued functionality. All aspects of your business should be considered during your BIA, and you should be prepared to replace a vital function should it be destroyed or halted.

Other variables worth considering are your Recovery Time Objective (RTO) and your Recovery Point Objective (RPO). Your RTO is measured by how long your business can last without access to mission-critical data and applications. RPO is determined by how recent your backups are when the systems are capable of being restored. Your recovery plan is dependent on these two variables, and they should both be carefully considered before committing to a recovery plan. For instance, if you have a longer RTO, you won’t need a complicated recovery system in place.

This might be a lot to take in for a small or medium-sized business owner, but data backup and disaster recovery are equally as important to your business as they are to larger enterprises. Directive strives to provide smaller businesses like yourself with tools which allow you to determine the perfect recovery solution for your organization. Our trusted IT professionals can help you build a continuity plan which will help your business sustain the least amount of damage while improving data redundancy. Call us today at 607.433.2200 to learn more.