You’ve got a great disaster recovery plan in place…so you think. You’ve spent hours testing and bulletproofing it from top to bottom. To you, it doesn’t look like there’s a thing wrong. Everything on the surface looks great, but there are things you’ve forgotten to check.
Even as you create your disaster recovery plan, your IT infrastructure changes. For many small healthcare businesses like yours, this is the sleeping giant of a problem you don’t realize until disaster strikes.
Have you addressed these disaster recovery problems?
Here are some things you might not have checked:
1. You Haven’t Defined What a Disaster Is:
It’s easy to say a disaster is a tornado, fire, flood, or any of the obvious natural disasters. However, a disaster could also be a successful hacking attempt. Or it could be a data breach by one of your own employees. Your organization needs to continually evaluate what you consider to be a disaster so you know how to respond when one happens.
2. You Haven’t Fully Defined “Critical Assets:”
What do you absolutely need on a daily basis to keep your business operating? How has that changed since you last reviewed your disaster recovery plan?
Your critical assets can include things like:
• Equipment
• Data
• Key employees
Or anything else you need to run on a daily basis. Make sure you evaluate this regularly.
3. You Try To Back Up Everything:
Yes…it’s important to back up your data. But for many small healthcare companies, around 40-70% of it doesn’t change and can be archived so you may not need ALL of that data backup. The remaining data changes frequently and should be replicated on a daily basis.
If you can segregate the regularly used data from the data that doesn’t change, you can cut many hours off your restore times. And you can save some much-needed capital too.
4. Are All Branch Offices Included in Your Disaster Recovery Plan?:
Even before the era of bring-your-own-device, companies as a whole weren’t doing a good job of managing the data and networks of branch offices. If your company doesn’t already, you should use cloud backup that includes data from all offices, not just your main location.
5. Do You Use a Minimum Equipment Configuration?:
You don’t need to fully replicate your production environment when you design your recovery environment. All you need is a minimal configuration that gets you up and running again. That also saves you time and money when a disaster happens because you can start operating faster.
If you missed those disaster recovery signs, your healthcare company’s got some work to do – work that could save costs amounting to six figures or more. Or you can hire a managed IT services firm to do the work for you.
