Are You Ready to Recover from a Disaster?

Spring is here, and it can bring either great weather or crazy storms. When thinking about dealing with a blizzard or other inclement weather that could knock out your data center for days or even weeks, a wise IT department has contingency plans to deal with whatever is thrown at them. Is your data center ready for disaster recovery?

Test Those Backups

There is no worse time to find out that your backups aren’t working than when you try to restore them after disaster strikes. If your backups are corrupted, not saving properly or not capturing all of the data that they should, this can be a huge issue for your company. That is why it is so important to test your backups before they are needed.

Set up a test at least once a month (more would be better) to ensure that the data you are backing up can be restored when you need to. Virtual servers are a great way to do this. Older hardware can also be a good backup restoration target. Ensure that your restore covers all of the important data that your company needs to function. This might mean having meetings with the data users to understand what is important to them and what isn’t. Critical systems should be the first on the list to check, followed by support systems.

Finally, make sure to document your recovery tests so that any issues you encounter, you have a record of what was done to overcome them.

A Business Continuity Plan

What is your plan when disaster strikes?  Remember, each hour that is spent with critical systems offline is money that the company is losing. Don’t wait until a disaster strikes to come up with a continuity plan.

Make sure your plan includes recovery from both physical and electrical problems. A long power outage can be addressed by having cloud server access to data. A physical problem like a snow storm or fire can be dealt with by setting up a VPN with access to private data servers hosted off-site.

Make sure your plan provides for every scenario that can occur to ensure that your business is backed up and running as quickly as possible.

Is All Your Critical Data Protected?

It is easy to make sure that your major database servers and network devices are backed up for disaster recovery. What about the essential data that you might be missing? The access database has critical data for an analyst that they have saved on their local hard drive. Experimental data taken in a lab and saved to a standalone machine is in the basement. All of these things can be critical data lurking near your network that you are not aware of.

U.S. Computer Connection Offers IT Support and Services to Your Company

Looking for help setting up your disaster recovery plan? U.S. Computer Connection can help!