February 21
Having a disaster recovery plan in place is crucial to protecting your organization’s data and maintaining operations when things don’t go as planned.
A thorough disaster recovery plan covers human-caused and natural disasters, so no matter what happens you can recover data, protect your infrastructure, and otherwise maintain your business. This is particularly crucial in high-compliance industries where downtime and data loss are both unacceptable.
Here are five considerations when creating or updating your disaster recovery plan:
1. Downtime
How much downtime can your application tolerate, and how is your organization ensuring downtime is averted if 0% downtime is the threshold?
- Utilizing your disaster recovery plan.
- Ensuring always-on interconnectivity through your digital infrastructure.
- Deploying best practices and seasoned engineers to manage the recovery.
By implementing these simple strategies your team can make sure your organization is never down or back up and running as quickly as possible.
2. Data Integrity
What plan do you have in place to ensure your data is valid following a disaster? You’ll want to include a data integrity check within your IT team’s disaster recovery plan. This may involve:
- Validating the data’s input.
- Ensuring the accuracy of the data itself.
- Checking and updating who has access and control to the data.
By validating your data, you can remove any corrupted data, and improve your overall data environment to minimize the chance of a disaster happening in the first place.
3. RTO and RPO
Going hand-in-hand with downtime and data integrity are RTO and RPO.
Recovery Time Objective (RTO) is the maximum amount of downtime that your organization can manage without losing a significant amount of revenue.
Recovery Point Objective (RPO) is the maximum amount of data that can be lost due to an unexpected disaster.
You’ll want to include both of these in your 2022 disaster recovery plan and utilize them as guidelines for your recovery time and other aspects of your plan.
4. Loss of Revenue
If your organization faces downtime and is unable to access data, or is put in a similar situation following a disaster, you will likely face a loss of revenue.
It’s important to plan for this, as you need to know thresholds of money your organization can stand to lose without significant repercussions.
5. Loss of Reputation
Harder to quantify but perhaps of the utmost importance, downtime can impact your business’ reputation.
You can do a number of things to mitigate your organization’s loss of reputation, including:
- Being transparent about the situation.
- Offering honest, timely solutions.
- Ensuring your customers know that you have a disaster recovery plan in place and are working tirelessly to remedy the issues at hand.
Through each of these considerations, it’s also important to explain who is responsible for what steps. By clearly delegating each task, you can ensure your organization has a smooth disaster recovery process.
Is Your Organization Prepared?
Prevention is always better than a cure, so it’s crucial that your organization does everything in its power to avoid disasters in the first place. Colocation, for example, is a great way to secure your data, ensure 99.999% availability, while having high-performance, low-latency network interconnectivity.
At Evoque, we ensure our data centers maximize the availability, security, and resiliency of your data, so you can focus on running your business. Ready to get started? Contact us today to discuss how colocation solutions, interconnectivity, and more can help you prepare for unforeseen circumstances.
