Infrastructure

Why disaster recovery should have your attention

For many companies, IT systems are essential to run their mission-critical operations and services. Business processes are increasingly depending on IT, which makes the availability of these systems even more crucial. When their availability is compromised it poses a huge risk to your business. In the event of an incident, it is important to get back on track as soon as possible.

What is Disaster Recovery (DR)?

With DR, you think about all the risks that your company may face and what might jeopardize business continuity. You then define rules and guidelines that ensure your company will be back up and running as soon as possible. This in terms of both your company’s infrastructure and data.

Sidenote: Don’t get caught by the idea that disaster recovery is only important for large multinational companies. In fact, the size of your company doesn’t matter at all!

Now why is this important?

Imagine an incident occurs. If that happens, then what is important to your business?

• Your company needs to be able to respond efficiently
• Your services have to continue working (or be operational again as soon as possible)
• Your customers’ data have to remain protected at all costs

Can’t guarantee the above? Then chances are your customers will no longer trust you – resulting in reputational damage. In addition, downtime has major financial consequences. If your infrastructure and data are (temporarily) unavailable, your business processes cannot continue and your services are being interrupted. This will result in: a loss of productivity, revenue and/or profits.

The importance of a Disaster-Recovery Plan (DRP)

A disaster recovery plan is a must-have within your disaster recovery process. It’s best to work with relevant members of your team to design a plan with guidelines for restoring infrastructure and business data after an incident. It’s important to guarantee your business continuity as much as possible and minimize the impact of such incidents.

If you want to create a high-quality DRP, you need a detailed overview of your IT infrastructure and your applications. The next step is to prepare a risk analysis and recovery procedure. When doing this, don’t forget to think about your Recovery Point Objectives and Recovery Time Objectives.

Mistakes you'd rather not make according to disaster recovery

Sadly not every company pays attention to disaster recovery. And when they do, unfortunately, many mistakes are still being made.

Mistakes you would rather not make:

You haven’t tested your DRP
You don’t have an offline version available
You do not have any spare hardware available
You do not have a backup plan for your physical workstation

Your backups are incomplete or they have not been checked

Next step: testing your disaster recovery plan

As we already indicated, Disaster Recovery Testing (DRT) is the next step. However, testing it is not enough; you obviously need to analyze the results as well. This way, you can identify and resolve possible blind spots and problem areas.

How to start testing your disaster recovery plan?

Assemble a test team
Define what you want to test and accomplish in detail
Prepare your disaster recovery environment.
Prepare a report and analyze the results
Test and analyze your plan regularly

Conclusion

It’s not easy to develop a disaster recovery policy. You have to keep a lot of things in mind. That’s why our experts are at your service. Could you use our help? Don’t hesitate to contact us. We would love to take care of your IT environment.