The unforeseen disasters can happen to any business and cripple day to day operations in no time. However, your best bet as a small- or medium-sized business is to have a Disaster Recovery Plan in place, which will ensure that the business recovers quickly and with minimum damage.
Here are some tips for implementing this in an efficient and reliable manner:
- Balance the essential with the possible: This means that as a business, it pays to be reasonable when it comes to creating a backup plan. For instance, requiring that server failures be checked and servers put back online within 12 hours of an outage can mean only one thing – having to buy additional hardware. This drives up cost unnecessarily, and is something most businesses can do without.
- Look for flexibility: One good idea is for businesses to use their existing resources flexibly to retain continuity, rather than be faced with a severe shortfall in infrastructure. For instance, data that is being backed up can be compressed first to save storage until additional hardware arrives, even though this means loss of access speed.
- Relooking at redundancy: While businesses know the importance of creating redundant servers, not many plan for the harsh day when the disaster strikes. The entire facility can be destroyed, in worst cases, such as when there is a fire. This means that redundant servers should be placed at different locations, so that not all are simultaneously affected.
Disaster recovery is all about being practical and planning right for the crisis, even if it means having to stretch your IT budgets a little.
Image Source: http://www.flickr.com/photos/allhandsvolunteers
