Disaster Recovery Planning
In today’s work environment, disaster planning is about more than insuring a physical office or having emergency plans for workers. Disaster recovery planning a way to retrieve data and information from computers is also an important component of salvaging your business from a crisis.
What would happen to your business if a disaster like a fire, an earthquake, or a flood were to hit your business? What would happen to your company’s computer data? Would you be able to recover in the event that all your computers including servers were destroyed?
These are serious questions that all business owners and IT planning personnel should ask themselves on a regular basis. Although no one likes to think about disasters, they do happen, and when they do, businesses should always be prepared. After all, in a business world that is dependent on technology, ensuring that your data is safe and that your business can continue despite a disaster is often the only way to keep a business operating after the unlikely occurs. This is especially true as your technology grows and changes, since you’ll want to prepare each new piece of technology for a potential crisis.
Disaster Recovery Plan Basics
Disaster recovery planning (DRP) is also known as business continuity plan (BCP). It is considered a mainstay of enterprise computing, particularly for large or spread-out organizations. However, smaller organizations can also benefit from the fundamentals of having a disaster recovery plan, since any information loss can set you back weeks or even months.
Disaster recovery plans vary from organization to organization. In most cases, disaster recovery plans include some type of backup plan for data as well as a plan for an alternate site for work to continue in the event that the main office is compromised due to a disaster. For larger companies, a disaster recovery plan may also include a phone tree to ensure organized communication of what is happening with the company in the event of an emergency.
Data Backups and Disaster Recovery
Backups are an essential part of any disaster recovery planning. Whether data is lost due to a catastrophic hardware failure or due to a disaster, all essential data should be duplicated and kept in a secure location.
The time to think about a disaster is before it happens. By planning ahead to find a site to run your business from in the event of a disaster, running regular backups of your important computer data, and having a plan for recovery, your business will be well prepared to continue despite the odds.
Daniel Gottilla author
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