Regardless of the various measures you take to ensure the smooth functioning of your entire operation, including designing fail-safe systems, you will eventually encounter hardware failure at some point. The IT system is complex with a number of elements that are just as important as the other to ensure optimal functioning.
Due to this, businesses of every type and size need to have a Disaster Recovery Plan in place in case disaster strikes and you need to resume functioning as soon as possible. In case your business ever experiences this, you need a way to ensure that you have the least amount of downtime.
Having an entire disaster recovery team in the house to make sure your entire data and backups are safe and ready to be recovered at a moment’s notice, is extremely crucial.
They are also responsible for taking care of your critical systems, and keeping the relationship with your customers intact while you deal with the disaster.
What Is a Disaster Recovery Plan?
A disaster recovery plan basically holds all the information on the steps and processes you need to follow in order to ensure a quick response in the event of a disaster, including malicious attacks by hackers and viruses, or just falling victim to a natural disaster.
A disaster such as this could have a detrimental effect on the trust your customers have in your brand and they might choose not to engage with you again leading to a financial loss.
It is a comprehensive guide to finding a way out of any disaster that might occur and minimizing the damage along the way along with restoring smooth functioning as soon as possible. The plan must be divided by the location and kind of problem you encounter, followed by easy-to-follow instructions that your staff can implement without any confusion.
Which disasters should be covered in a DRP?
A disaster recovery plan should not only include disasters of huge magnitude such as your entire system being hacked or ridden with a virus that takes it down.
It should also include a variety of disaster recovery plans for situations including DDoS attacks that last for a longer duration and can result in your hardware and software failures, your customers being unable to access your website and at times cause irreversible damage. The more in-depth your DRP is, the easier it will be to implement.
What should a server disaster recovery plan include?
There are certain elements to remember while creating a disaster recovery plan. The most important aspect is ensuring your DRP is easy to understand and follow while including all the minute steps so that even a person who is unfamiliar with the process will be able to implement it.
You can become a victim of a disaster of varying types and magnitude at any point in time. It could also land you in a situation where your assigned technician is unavailable.
If you need to use a technician who entirely new to your system and has to be called at a moment’s notice, he needs to easily understand the plans and figure out how to implement them.
It should also include information as minute as where the server is located and all the functioning it takes care of. There should be no need to ask anyone who deals with what part of the operation.
In case it is very complex to access your server, the server disaster recovery plan needs to offer proper guidance on how to deal with this as well. If your server is completely rendered useless, and the backup comes into play, your Disaster recovery plan needs to mention proper steps on where to find the backup and how to restore it. You can check R1Soft Backup Solution: High-performance backup solution for lightning-fast data backups
What is an example of the necessity of a disaster recovery plan?
As the pandemic hit us unexpectedly in 2019, there were several businesses that choose to transfer their entire database to the cloud, in a desperate attempt to shield them from the ill effects Covid-19 had on a wide variety of businesses regarding evolving to accommodate work from home and deal with supply chain problems. Unfortunately, these are not the only type of disasters you need to have a solid plan for.
Along with dealing with Covid-19, Microsoft had to also deal with a staff member disclosing their entire customer support data. While it was not caused by malicious intent, but rather due to a misconfiguration during a change in their security, the data leak was still just as detrimental.
As they had a great disaster recovery plan in place, they were able to limit the damage and secure their database.
Conclusion
A disaster recovery plan might seem like too much trouble to make when everything is going great, however, when disaster strikes, it might prove to be the only thing that can stop your business from going under. So put together a disaster recovery plan keeping a number of scenarios in mind and relax knowing that your business is protected even if any disaster occurs.
For more information visit our Managed Dedicated Servers web page.