Disaster recovery planning is a must these days. Whether you start creating the right plan for compliance purposes or to help protect your company’s stakeholders, understanding how to keep your business running in the face of any kind of a disaster is par for the course in today’s economy. Not sure how you might recover? It’s actually a combination of understanding where you’ll be as well as what technologies you might need to employ.
<h2Where Will We Move our Company?
If your entire building loses power as the result of a terrorist attack or a tragic fire occurs, where will you do business? Some companies can make a fairly natural location shift. For example, if you have an alternate branch outside the disaster zone, it only makes sense to set up over there. Other companies, though, will need to set up a business continuity recovery center. In some cases, it will make sense to have your IT team right next to your office staff. In other cases, getting your IT team placed well before the office team will be key. Where will you go?
What Technology Do We Need to Get Back Online?
Your company, though, is more than just a location. In most cases, you also need your data, email, and other systems to function correctly, and disaster recovery planning takes that into account as well. As you begin to get ready to protect your company, you have to examine alternate architectures and technologies to help you recover as much data as you wish on your schedule. You’ll probably hear the terms “recovery point objective,” and “recovery time objective,” while you’re building your plan. Your recovery point objective is the level of data loss you can tolerate within your company. Your time objective is the speed at which you have to recover.
If, for example, you need to recover quickly with a minimum loss of data, you’ll investigate the technologies on the market today that will help you do just that. Your disaster recovery consultant can help you shop around and evaluate each product that could be the solution for your company in the event of a disaster.
The consequences of poor disaster recovery planning are nothing short of enormous. Knowing how to recover, no matter what the disaster, could help your business stay afloat while others are drowning in chaos.
