Tip of the Week: Preparing to Survive a Potential Disaster

Look, we know that thinking about disasters can be a nerve-wracking experience, but you need to acknowledge that your organization is constantly in danger of becoming subverted by challenges outside your control. While you might not be able to stop a disaster from striking, you can be prepared for when it does strike, as well as how you respond to it. Let’s go over some of the methods you can use to ensure you have a plan in place.

Be Sure to Audit Your Business, Including IT

If you want your disaster recovery attempts to succeed, you’ll have to know what to protect. A complete audit can make this process easier, including the technology which allows it to happen. Take a complete audit of your technology so you can best protect it against any potential issues during the recovery process.

Be Clear on Your Goals

When considering recovery, make sure that you have a clear picture in mind for what you want to recover. You should have an idea for where you need to get to in order for operations to resume largely unimpeded. You can use certain key metrics to help define this: your recovery time objective, or RTO, and your recovery point objective, or RPO.

RTO is how long your company can survive after a complete loss of IT resources, i.e. how long it can last until you resolve the issue. RPO, in comparison, is how much data you can lose before your operations are affected. When you know these two metrics, you will be able to take action to plan out your recovery process.

Involve Your Employees in Your Discussion

Your team can be immensely helpful during business continuity processes, so they should be included in your planning and implementation process. Assign roles and responsibilities that aid your organization in successfully recovering from a disaster scenario. On that note, ensure that everyone is clear on their role so that no one is surprised when it comes time to actually implement your deployment.

Finally, we want to encourage you to routinely test your solution so that you’re not caught off-guard in the event of a disaster. If you would like assistance with designing your approach to disaster recovery, testing it, and ensuring that your business has a safe future, SCW can help. Learn more by contacting us at (509) 534-1530.