Fuse is a Microsoft Partner, based in Northampton. We help organisations of all sizes to maximise IT efficiencies through the use of Microsoft cloud computing solutions.
How Can You Prepare Your Business For A Disaster Recovery?
Disasters are disasters largely because they are unexpected. And unexpected events can have severe consequences for your business - especially if you're unprepared. Recovering from a disaster without the proper preparation is a major money sink. To save resources and keep your business operational, therefore, you'll need a disaster recovery plan in place BEFORE disaster strikes.
Step One: Risk Assessment
How can you protect your business without fully understanding the risks? Every disaster recovery plan starts with a comprehensive risk assessment. During this process, you should identify all the critical systems your business uses. You'll also need to measure their importance to your processes.
A risk assessment should then move on to threats. You will need to make a list of the threats that face the systems you use, and their potential impact and severity – from a global pandemic to season flooding, from hacking to burglary. To be effective, your risk assessment plan should be thorough. When you're sure you've left no stone unturned, you can move to the next step.
Step Two: Definition of Objectives
There are two critical objectives that you'll need to define in your disaster recovery plan. The first is the recovery time objective, or RTO; the second is the recovery point objective, or RPO.
Your RTO is the measure of how quickly you want to have your systems working again. This might vary depending on function. For example, a critical system will need to be up and running instantaneously. Other systems may be able to survive a few hours of downtime without too heavy an impact.
Your RPO is used to define the point at which you want to restore your data. This indicates how much you may lose in a disaster situation. For instance, if your RPO is one hour, then you will want to restore your data to as it was one hour before the disaster happened.
Step three: Response and strategies
This is the key part of developing a disaster recovery plan. You'll need to consider who interacts with the data, what equipment they use, and which processes they follow. All of this is important when you're planning potential responses.
This is where things can get tricky. It can be wise to seek help from professionals who know about small business data backup services. Fuse can look over your plans with a fresh perspective, helping you to see where there may be holes, and how to fill them.
Data Backup and Restoration
Cloud-based databases and software are generally more robust than locally stored alternatives, and are easier and faster to restore. Unsurprisingly, it is the businesses with the most flexible, cloud-based IT that have adapted best to the current pandemic, while companies still dependent on office-based infrastructure have struggled. We can help you with an infrastructure migration to cloud services, enabling you to work from anywhere. This also makes it easier for you to backup and recover your data, by providing an alternative solution to local storage devices.
As well as this, Fuse can help develop a regular testing programme. This allows you to ensure your disaster recovery plan genuinely works. A disaster recovery plan is something that you might hopefully never use - but it's essential to have it there, just in case. Let us help you develop the right solution for your business.
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