Do you have a disaster recovery plan in place to protect your business from unexpected downtime or data loss? With winter fast approaching, it’s important for business owners to take precautions that will keep operations steady during bad weather.
A disaster recovery plan is like an emergency protocol. For example, let’s say a snowstorm takes down the power at your office and this short-circuits your IT hardware. With an appropriate disaster recovery plan in place, your business can recover from this incident both quickly and seamlessly.
Let’s see what steps make up an effective disaster recovery plan:
- Risk Assessment: How vulnerable is your business to various threats? How quickly will your business be able to bounce back after a disaster? Which systems are critical to your daily operations? These are just some of the questions you should ask yourself to determine how to protect your business moving forward.
- Data Backup: Your data should be frequently backed up and stored at an off-site location as a precautionary measure against situations like hardware failures. If disaster strikes, you can easily restore your data and get your business back up and running.
- Professional System Monitoring: Have a professional oversee your IT systems. They’ll be able to mitigate a lot of minor issues before they snowball into bigger problems and will immediately start rectifying bigger crises as soon as they happen.
- Utilize Cloud Services: Some incidents require employees to work from home for some time. With cloud services in place, employees can continue to work and even collaborate with one another remotely.
- Train Employees: Inform your employees of what they should do in the event of a system failure or other emergency. The more routine these trainings are, the better everyone will respond in the event of an actual problem.
- Document Your Plan: Place your plan somewhere that everyone can refer to it, like in the employee handbook or/and in a communal space at the office. Update this document after each risk assessment and make note of the date, so everyone will know they have the latest instructions.
- Do Test Runs: Test your emergency protocols and use the feedback to revise your plan. Ask your employees to participate as well so you can review how they should respond during a disaster. These tests are important to ensure all your recovery measures are functioning properly and that nothing important is overlooked.
Would you like help implementing a disaster recovery plan for your business? Call us at 914-934-9775 or email us at info@p-connect.com and ask us how PCI can help you improve your business’s disaster recovery plan. Our trained IT professionals will be able to assist you with each step of building and maintaining a comprehensive disaster recovery plan. That means no stress, minimal downtime and saved money for you!