Disaster recovery is the planning and process of recovering from unexpected, business-impacting events. Daily operations more reliant on data and IT systems than ever, allowing disasters to have massive consequences for unprepared businesses. Disasters can range from a flood or power outage to a targeted cyber attack that seizes your data systems and either steals, destroys, or locks down the information within.
While disaster recovery is closely related to both data backup and business continuity, the key differentiation is that disaster recovery refers to re-establishing the most crucial of systems and business functions, whereas data recovery and business continuity are broader in scope.
The Cost Of A Disaster
Disaster recovery has become mandatory for modern businesses. As data breaches and ransomware incidents target more organizations every day, businesses need to proactively prepare for the very real risk that they will be targeted. Businesses that do fall prey to a data breach can expect to suffer losses anywhere from an average of $3.92 million to as much as $100 million. Not having disaster recovery capabilities is a sure-fire way to end up at the higher end of that estimation.
Why Disaster Recovery Is Important
Businesses are now storing more sensitive and proprietary data than ever before. Law firms, insurance companies, HIPAA compliant health care facilities, government agencies, law enforcement, and labor unions all have real data security concerns.
What Should Be Included In Disaster Recovery
Whether an organization is dealing with customer data, health records, or confidential business data, being able to recover sensitive information after a disaster is a top-line priority. Data backup protects businesses against data loss risk by securely backing up critical data to a secondary storage location. This way, if businesses suffer a data loss or data theft incident, they can easily get back up and running as a result of their disaster recovery capabilities.
Hardware And Software Inventories And Assessment
Any damages to the hardware or software can have a negative ripple effect on your business, delaying daily operations and causing productivity bottlenecks. Inventorying your hardware and software provides you with a simple, but invaluable checklist for recovering operations should a disaster hit. As hardware and software come back online, you should have the capability to run comprehensive assessments to ensure that everything is still functioning optimally after the disaster event.
Immediate And Long-term Business Continuity
You should set clear guidelines for what the most mission-critical systems and operations are, and how to get them back online as fast as possible. Data backup capabilities tie in closely here. While some businesses will prefer to utilize on-site backup options, cloud-based backup capabilities can be a vital tool for providing businesses with remote data backup and recovery options, which can be invaluable if businesses are locked out from their primary location. Fully automated cloud backups can guarantee that critical data is never lost, and is able to be easily restored. Cloud solutions are also able to scale to requirements for businesses large and small which is an ever-growing concern as businesses handle exponentially increasing amounts of data.
Disaster Communications Plan
Operational disruption is synonymous with disasters, and nothing is more important in disruption than clear communication. An internal communications plan is vital for responding quickly and effectively in a crisis. If you have customers, clients, or dependents that are affected by the disaster, you should also have a clear external communications plan that addresses the nature of the event, the impact to client/customer/dependent, and how soon they can expect normal operations to resume.
Clear Roles, Responsibilities, And Expectations
When a disaster hits, getting back up and running with minimal recovery time relies on having pre-set roles, responsibilities, and expectations specified within your disaster recovery plan. In order to function cohesively, lines of authority need to be clearly understood, including:
- Who has the authority to declare a disaster
- Who has responsibility for each aspect of the disaster recovery plan
- Who is responsible for assessing damage
- Who is responsible for repairs
Talk To The Managed IT Experts Today
TCB provides Managed IT Services to clients nationwide utilizing remote software tools and unique cost-saving business and implementations. Having this arsenal readily available enables you to focus on what is important for your business. Talk to us today about your disaster recovery needs.
TCB 24×7 Expert Network IT Support is an innovative IT solution and computer product provider that focuses on ushering in flexible and efficient solutions that are tailored towards each business’s present and future needs to ensure onward development and satisfaction. We specialize in a number of crucial IT Support services for businesses such as data backup & disaster recovery and CTO consulting.