Many businesses are struggling with different ways of handling their disaster recovery plans. This is a series of solutions that every organization needs to be on top of, even if they are growing in complexity.
Recently, The Tennessean examined several best practices that organizations need to follow in order to develop a successful disaster recovery strategy. The first thing that organizations need to understand is the difference between business continuity and disaster recovery. These terms are used together, but play different roles.
Business continuity is the assets, threats and scenarios that adversely impact a company and the decisions that they create to mitigate risk. These are the actually factors needed to prevent a disaster scenario from hurting your business.
Disaster recovery, on the other hand, is the part of business continuity, that defines consistent, preplanned actions that are put into action when a disaster strikes. These are typically reactionary and can be used to recover data and keep a company up and running.
The problem for many businesses is that these systems are not completed because they are overly complex, time intensive and offer too many obstacles. However, because they have a growing importance to how organizations operate, companies need to plug away and deploy one successful.
For example, FEMA has reported that 40 percent of businesses fail to reopen after a disaster. Of those companies that do reopen, 25 percent only stay in business for an additional year.
This is where disaster recovery best practices come into play. These include:
- Define key assets, threats scenarios – Companies need to know what they want to protect and what the highest value information is. It is also critical to know the likelihood of every potential disaster. This allows organizations to start working on the right data and systems.
- Define recovery solutions – There are a number of systems that companies can deploy. Because of this, knowing the appropriate type and level of protection is key to success.
- Draft a disaster recovery plan – Organizations need to write everything down and communicate with the team about what they want to do and how it should be handled.
- Determine a place to go – Companies need to take into account working remotely, which can be key depending on the nature of the disaster. If it is a natural disaster, employees will not be in the office but business will still need to go on.
- Test and re-test – You can deploy any system, but if it is not tested carefully and repeatedly, there is the potential that when it is up against an actual disaster, it may not hold up.
Overall disaster recovery is in high demand for 2014. A press release from Asigra focused on the awards that the organization hands out for disaster recovery systems. It also mentioned that the trend is leaning toward more innovation.
"2014 has been an excellent year for cloud-based data protection as businesses of every caliber are challenged with protecting more data than ever spread across an increasing number of computing endpoints," David Farajun, CEO of Asigra, said in the press release. "As our service providers prove on a daily basis, these challenges are easily overcome with the right technology and team in place."
With the help of an IT support service, any organization will be able to deploy a reliable disaster recovery solution.
