Do you remember some of those times you ventured into a forest or an organized jungle safari only to spot the tiger? You might or might not get to see a flesh-eating, huge Malaysian tiger or the nimbly dangerous Asian tiger. If you run a small or mid-sized business, your chances of experiencing an IT related disaster is more probable.
Apart from human induced disasters, the very nature of technology breakdowns, and natural disasters, businesses are sure to wipe out. That explains the increasing need for proper disaster recovery plans. If disaster recovery is on your list of things to do for your business, here’s what you should keep in mind:
Improve your disaster preparation efforts
No amount of planning or preparation is ever enough for disaster recovery. Set up definite DR (Disaster Recovery) exercises (much like fire drills and escape drills), familiarize employees and everyone involved about the importance of data backups, disaster recovery, and how much your business depends on IT and data to inch forward. During exercises, included all the business stakeholders, involve everyone by rotating responsibilities, and also develop specific risk-based scenarios.
Take to Virtualization
Here’s a scenario: Would you rather invest in a huge bank of servers and other equipment for your disaster recovery and let them sit waiting for a disaster (Pun Intended) waiting to happen? Alternatively, would you like it if you could dramatically rope in virtual machines to take over and save your big data, company records, and precious IT computing potential? If we know our clients any better, it’d always be the latter. Today companies prefer to avoid paying for dedicated disaster recovery systems and instead use technology such as virtualization and reduce costs.
The Positive side of BYOD helps DR
Who would have thought, right? BYOD is touted to be big in the future and while companies are left to debate whether it should be encouraged or not, it conveniently has a side benefit: the fact that multiple and individual devices will connect to the network, a disaster still lets employees and business users connect, communicate, collaborate, and get work done. Yes, there are complications involved with BYOD and the cloud just got a bit more complicated with the influx of mobile devices. BYOD does have that one single thread that stil connect business users in case of an emergency.
Disaster Recovery Vendors should be a part of your DR plan
You should keep in touch just for the sake of keeping in touch, they say. That holds well in the IT industry too, and especially for your business. Talk and maintain relationships with vendors who provide Business Continuity, Data backup, Data migration, and Disaster Recovery services – even if there’s no such event witnessed or even when you don’t foresee such an event to occur. Why, you ask? Try to find when while your business sits in a state of no action. Not likely to happen, right?
While we are at it, we do provide business continuity and disaster recovery services and we follow our own preaching. Talk to us today and keep that relationship going. We are the good people and we might just help you get your business right on track.
714-333-9620