What are the top questions your organization should be able to answer about disaster recovery?
They might be these:
1. Has Your Senior Leadership Bought into the Need for a Disaster Recovery Plan?
If not, it’s time to start talking about one. Yes, it’s unlikely your physical location will ever be destroyed by a natural disaster. Who knows? The chances may be less than 1%. But, if that does happen, they need to know they could lose the entire business without a good disaster recovery plan. If that doesn’t happen, at minimum they will lose lots of time and money – unnecessarily. Disaster recovery plans pay for themselves.
2. Do You Use Virtualization?
Increasingly, it’s easier to distribute your IT systems over multiple geographic locations. The benefit of virtualization is that if your physical location gets destroyed, you have hardware located in other areas to keep running.
3. How Thorough is Your Disaster Recovery System?
It’s fairly common at many SMBs to back up only select files and folders on specific servers – rather than backing up everything. You may think you have the most important data backed up, and you can replace or get by without the rest.
However, your operating system files may not be backed up. And do you really know what you do and do not need? You may not know what you’re missing until you have a disaster and actually need to recover! You may be interested in our disaster recovery eGuide:
4. Are You Sure Your Backups are Running Correctly?
You may have a backup process in place. But is it running? When was the last time you tested your backup process?
5. Where Do You Store Your Backup Data?
If you have to use tapes, you should have multiple copies in differing locations. Ideally, though, you have backups over the cloud. Even though you hear about the cloud IT getting hacked, it’s better to use if you have a secure provider. This is because your data gets stored safely across several geographic locations.
6. Do You Know How Long It Will Take You to Recover?
Okay, so everything else in your backup process looks perfect. Have you ever thought about how long it will take you to fully replicate your data in the event your headquarters gets destroyed? Restoring your data, in some cases, can take up to 2 days! Can your business live with that time frame? If not, you need to audit your restoration process and find a way to speed it up.
7. When Did You Last Test Your Backup Process? `
You should do this at least annually, or more often. Many times, when small businesses get asked this question, the looks on the owner’s faces go blank. You test all other aspects of your small business, so why wouldn’t you do the same with your backups?
Your organization should be able to answer those disaster recovery questions. If you can’t, you put your business at significant risk!
Think about hiring a firm to monitor your disaster recovery and computer and network maintenance and to provide data backup.
