Business safeguard strategy: a seven-point plan for warding off calamity for your venture
In today's digital age, businesses are increasingly relying on managed services providers (MSPs) to offload day-to-day IT operations, allowing them to focus on core activities. One such service that has gained traction is 'Disaster Recovery as a Service' (DRaaS), a more sophisticated cloud backup offering that provides entire failover operations.
The importance of a swift recovery after a disaster cannot be overstated. A well-planned business continuity strategy, facilitated by MSPs, can help businesses get up and running quickly. Backup systems today keep a copy of data remotely, such as in a remote data centre, to prevent loss in case of fire or theft.
A prime example of successful disaster recovery using Datto technology is a Derbyshire-based estate agent whose main office burnt down in 2014. Despite the catastrophic event, the business was operational the next morning at another location.
Testing business continuity and disaster recovery plans is essential. This includes live testing of IT failures and scenarios where the head office is unavailable, necessitating mobile and home working. MSPs offer a central resource with a help desk, providing predictable billing and expertise on hand during disaster recovery.
Creating an effective IT disaster recovery plan (DRP) involves several key steps. First, audit IT resources, inventorying all assets such as hardware, software, data, and network infrastructure, and assessing their criticality to business operations. Identify critical operations and systems that need to be kept running or restored quickly during a disaster. Analyse potential disruptors relevant to your industry and business, such as cyberattacks, hardware failures, natural disasters, or human error.
Assign roles and responsibilities clearly, defining who is responsible for what during a disaster recovery event, including authority for declaring disasters and performing recovery tasks. Establish recovery goals by setting recovery time objectives (RTOs) and recovery point objectives (RPOs) to guide how quickly systems must be restored and how recent restored data must be.
Create detailed recovery procedures, writing step-by-step instructions for recovering each critical system and service, including data restoration, system startup, and validation checks. The procedures should be clear enough that staff unfamiliar with recovery can follow them. Develop communication protocols, defining who to notify, how, and in what order.
Regularly test the disaster recovery plan through drills and simulated recovery exercises to identify issues and update the plan based on emerging risks and changes in the IT environment.
Resources for creating and testing a DRP include templates and guides from websites like Indeed and Adaptive IS, professional IT services from MSPs, monitoring and backup tools from platforms like Splunk, and regular drills and validations to ensure readiness.
In summary, a thorough IT disaster recovery plan requires identifying critical assets and threats, assigning clear roles, creating detailed recovery steps and communication plans, and regularly testing and updating the plan with tools and possibly professional support to ensure resilience.
Moreover, MSPs are partnering with software firms to deliver cloud and communications applications, including data backup and disaster recovery services. Cloud computing offers more flexibility and continuity, with services like Google's applications, Salesforce, Office 365, and Dropbox becoming popular.
However, IT and communications systems are a weakness and have a formidable range of threats. To mitigate these risks, businesses should have an IT disaster recovery plan that takes into account the setup, server, backup, virus and security protection, communications link redundancy, home working provision, and security from the point of view of data theft.
The most important part of an IT setup is data, and ensuring that it is backed up and protected is crucial. Using an MSP can enable the company to have the IT part of the test conducted for them. Having a robust business continuity plan is a top priority for companies.
The Business Continuity Institute provides free resources such as checklists, standards, and guides to help with business continuity planning. Despite the challenges, a well-prepared business can weather any storm and continue to thrive.
- A well-prepared small-business can rest assured that technology advancements, such as Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS), partnered with managed services providers (MSPs), can provide a robust IT disaster recovery plan essential for business continuity and rapid recovery after a disaster.
- With the increasing reliance of small-business on technology for daily operations, a strategic investment in cloud-based disaster recovery solutions, supported by MSPs, can significantly improve finance-related outcomes by minimizing data loss and downtime, ultimately contributing to business resilience.
