Written By: Jonathan Arena, CISSP, ITIL, CSM
President & Founder of White Clay Technology
I remember sitting in disaster recovery tabletop exercises and people running through the different scenarios and they get to pandemic, they kind of just laughed and shrugged it off and went to the next one. I’ll bet they’re not laughing now…
Covid-19 caught everyone off guard. It’s emergence proved one thing to me. There are far too many businesses without disaster preparedness plans.
In my many conversations with business owners I have heard a litany of reasons why they don’t have one.
- We’re too small!
- It can’t happen to us!
- I don’t have time to waste!
- I don’t have money!
- I don’t have resources!
- I’ll do it next year.
- …and about 30 other excuses like it.
Regardless of your reason, like Benjamin Franklin said, “If you fail to plan, you are planning to fail.”
The simplest and one of the most important thing every business can do to protect themselves is to back up their critical data regularly. Backups are a critical piece of any disaster recovery plan.
In addition to local devices, don’t forget to also make a full offsite backup of your website, web applications, and any business critical data that you keep at a cloud or SaaS provider…and do this even if they claim to perform backups for you.
Finally, make sure you perform a test restore of your backups to make sure it is good. A backup is only good as the last time it was tested.
Once you’re doing the basics by backing up your data, the next most important step for you to do is ensure your systems resilience so that if there is a disaster, your applications or data can weather the storm. Is it redundant? Is the server or device load balanced…etc.
If you need help determining your disaster recovery or resilience plan, please contact us for help!