At any time, things can go wrong, disaster can occur. That’s why it is important for organisations to ensure that if the worst does happen, then there is a plan in place to get things back on track.
For those unfamiliar with Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS), it’s a backup service model that uses cloud resources to protect applications and data from disruption caused by a disaster. It also provides a total system back up that allows business continuity in the event of system failure.
In this, the first of our two-part series, we’ll look at the things you need to consider when creating your DRaaS plan.
Making a Plan
With the proper DR planning and technology, your organisation can recover from any instance, be it power outages, theft, cyber-attacks, or even those less sophisticated disruptions, let’s face it, nobody want to be the rogue squirrel’s next victim…
Here’s our 5 key steps to making your plan:
1. Know your risks
Identify the risks your business could face, consider:
Make a list of all the possible risks affecting your business, include key stakeholders’ views
Assess the impact of each risk, be it financial, customer service or reputation
Timeframe how long it would take to recover from the risk
2. Anticipate IT risks
It’s not always easy to predict what parts of your system could fail and the impact this would have on your organisation. So, this is where the experts come in by examining the probability of failure across all components of your core system, whether this is in the cloud, outsourced or on-premise. We’ve delivered this for hundreds of organisations over the years and happy to help.
3. Understand the road to recovery
If you know your risks, you can plan your recovery. Resilience, availability, business continuity and back up recovery strategies are all in play here. Understanding the road to recovery is usually defined by recovery point objective (RPO) and recovery time objective (RTO).
RPO: Identifies how much data will be lost in an incident or how much will need be recovered
RTO: Your organisation’s recovery window, the time it that can pass before the incident has serious impact on your operations
4. Create a response strategy
If your organisation can’t get by on cloud-based services or remote working, you’ll need to think about alternative working locations in the event of a disaster and how to move your staff and technology there.
Good communication will allow your business to contain a disaster and ensure effective recovery. Setting up a disaster response team can really help here, with someone specifically focused on communicating internally and externally on behalf of the business.
5. Test, test, test
A lot of time and effort will be spent creating a DR plan, therefore it’s important to test, review and update.
Testing will identify your plans resilience, ability to perform under pressure and identify any weaknesses in the plan itself. Insights from this can then be used to improve, re-think and build confidence in your DR plan.
How can we help?
We strongly recommend having a fully customised DR plan in place and when it comes to the technology side of things, an established IT partner who can collaborate with you to create, test and implement your plan will be of huge benefit.
Disaster Recovery Plan
With almost 40 years’ experience helping customer with IT and data security challenges, we offer the consultation and support that’s needed to make your business safe, secure and successful.
We have a range of cloud-based solutions that could help you with your DR plans and keeping your business secure, including StorageCraft, whose product stores backup copies, recovers data, virtualises machines and can get an entire site’s critical operations back online within minutes.
For more information on Disaster Recovery or any of our managed IT services you can speak directly with your Kick account manager. If you are new to Kick then contact us or call us on 01698 844 600 to arrange a no-obligation chat.