Disaster Preparedness Includes Planning For Data Recovery

Today is Disaster Preparedness Day! This means that there’s no time quite like the present for preparing for potential future data emergencies. While the type of disasters vary immensely depending on your business’s geographical location, every business needs a disaster recovery plan implemented as soon as possible.

Preparing your business for disaster recovery is a difficult task, and certainly one that shouldn’t be taken lightly. There are so many variables that need to be taken into consideration before implementing a solid, fool-proof plan. Here are three questions you should ask yourself when considering the state of your current backup and disaster recovery solution, or preparing to implement a new one.

What Natural Disasters Is Your Busines Prone To?
It doesn’t matter where your location is; there’s always the risk that your business will fall victim to a freak accident. Take, for example, the Belgium-based data center owned by Google that was struck by lightning four consecutive times. While it’s difficult, at best, to prepare for this kind of threat, your business needs to think hard about what kinds of damage could be done by flooding, fire damage, power outages, hurricanes, lightning, and other natural disasters.

To this end, having an off-site copy of your business’s data is much more efficient than keeping all backups in-house. Fires, floods, and other disasters often destroy your business’s physical data infrastructure when they strike, which often means that your business’s on-site backups are also eliminated.

How Quickly Can You Recover Your Data?
Organizations need the ability to recover their data in a moment’s notice, primarily because downtime is an exceptionally expensive side-effect of dealing with a disaster. Time spent recovering from a major data loss is time spent not making profits. Thus, businesses that take too much time to recover will find that they can’t continue functioning, and businesses that fail to recover their mission-critical IT systems more often than not file for bankruptcy within a year of the incident.

This is why it’s so important for businesses to be able to rapidly recover from a major data loss incident. Preferred’s Backup and Disaster Recovery solution is designed to mitigate downtime by restoring your backed-up data to the device as soon as the incident occurs. This keeps your team productive and your systems operational, even under the worst circumstances.

What’s the Current State of Your Technology?
Finally, one of the biggest disasters that is often unprepared for is the chance of hardware failure. When your mission-critical systems fail unexpectedly, you can lose vital information that’s necessary for day-to-day operations. Just like any other data loss incident, you can be sure that this will dramatically affect your bottom line, and the downtime caused by such an event could cost your company significant capital in hardware replacement fees.

Thankfully, proactive monitoring and maintenance of your IT systems can help to mitigate the risks of hardware failure. With proper care, problems and symptoms of impending hardware failure can either be resolved, or prepared for. Preferred can do this easily with our remote monitoring and maintenance solution, which allows you to concentrate on your business’s operations while we focus on keeping your IT systems up and running.

For more information about BDR solutions or remote monitoring and maintenance, reach out to us at 708-781-7110. Take advantage of Disaster Preparedness Day so you don’t regret it later.