The thing with disaster recovery is that you think you rarely need it. Because disasters come only once in a while and what are the chances it will happen to you, right? So you tend to put it off, often forgetting about it or not implementing one for your company. But when you are caught in a disaster, that’s when you wish that you had an effective disaster recovery system in place.
It always helps to be prepared in the event of a disaster. You could save money and your reputation by being able to bounce back quickly after a disaster. What’s more, your online systems might be your company’s bread and butter and a minute offline could mean that you are losing revenues and sales quickly.
An effective disaster recovery system does not need to be expensive or complicated. Here’s what you need to remember when you get effective disaster recovery for your business.
- Keep it simple. When your office is burned to the ground or there are flood everywhere, the last thing you would need is to have a high availability solution that is complicated. You need something simple wherein you do not need to pore through hundreds of pages in a manual before you understand what you need to do to get your systems back online. What’s more, if you opt for a complicated system, then be prepared to encounter errors. A complicated system might also hinder a less skilled employee from doing disaster recovery. So at all times keep your disaster recovery systems easy to learn, easy to operate and easy to deploy even during an emergency.
- Test your disaster recovery solutions. When it comes to high availability and disaster recovery, it is not enough to just install it and deploy it. You would need to test it. This is easier said than done because to actually test a disaster recovery solution, you would need to disrupt your business and shut down your production environment. However, you would need to test your disaster recovery solution in order to know that it will work during an actual disaster, and it will also show you configuration errors that you might have made.
- Use one disaster recovery solution for every part of your IT. Most disaster recovery solutions out there work only on one platform or one operating system. This creates to silos of disaster recovery solutions that you all have to deploy and manage separately. See if you could standardize your disaster recovery to a single vendor or provider.
- Keep the costs down. There are disaster recovery and storage solutions out there that could help you keep the costs down. If you already have your IT investments in place, choose a disaster recovery solution that is compatible with what you already have. It makes no sense to replace hardware and software because your disaster recovery solution dictates it. Nor should you do an expensive migration to a new platform if you really do not need it. Take advantage of your current infrastructure.
Want to understand disaster recovery and how you could implement it for your business? Four Cornerstone can help you with that! Call us today.
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