Now more than ever are businesses reliant on technology to ensure the smooth operation of their business. For example, our servers process and hold essential business information, computers and hardware is used by our employees every day to transfer and hold key data, even the telephone systems that we use are vital for communication with our customers.
When we first start working alongside a new client we often ask them what they would do if their server went down and key business data was lost as a result, or what the company process is if they are hit with a cyber-attack?
Even though many of us are becoming more aware of these potential disasters, many of our clients fail to have an extensive disaster recovery policy in place for their organisation.
What is a disaster recovery policy?
To keep it simple, the definition of a disaster recovery policy is:
A document that outlines all the processes that must be carried out in the event of a disaster, such as data loss or a manmade error, to ensure that the business is able to perform normally within a short amount of time.
Creating a disaster recovery policy
Our IT services professionals would always recommend that a disaster recovery policy works in conjunction with a business continuity plan. Both documents work towards the same goal of ensuring that should a disaster occur, an extensive plan with key steps to follow to get the business back up and running is in place.
When starting a disaster recovery policy, the first step should be an inventory of the hardware, software and data that your business heavily relies on, this will give you a good starting point for putting restoration processes in place.
Once you have established a full inventory the next step is to take a full back up of critical information, assessing the hardware that is used to run key business software and taking copies of these that are ready to install on replacement equipment.
Be sure to test these regularly to ensure that they are operating correctly in the event of a disaster.
Businesses of all sizes collect and use large amounts of data every day, therefore data recovery should be a key part of any disaster recovery policy. The loss of data could result in significant downtime for a business, therefore ensuring that backups are carried out regularly to a network server from all devices is essential.
Leave your disaster recovery policy to the experts
For many of our clients, the idea of creating and implementing their own disaster recovery policy just doesn’t sit well with them. Instead they require a knowledgeable and experienced team of IT specialists to take control.
If this sounds like you, our IT team at Seriun can help you to put the correct steps in place. We have worked with hundreds of businesses on their disaster recovery policies, ensuring smooth operation and minimal downtime.
To speak to a member of our team call us on 01282 500770.