IT Disaster Recovery Planning: Minimize Your Risk

In today’s digital world, technology disruption for even a few hours can result in significant financial consequences to your business. It’s crucial for businesses of all sizes to practice IT Disaster Recovery Planning so that they have procedures and solutions in place in case of an emergency. In fact, according to Gartner, the average cost of IT downtime is $5,600 USD per minute or more than $300,000 per hour. For large organizations, that number tops half a million dollars.

Ensuring that your assets, data and hardware are protected is only part of a disaster recovery plan – the rest is determining a process for how quickly you can be back up and running. Rather than scrambling to put the pieces back together after a major storm or cyber-attack, smart businesses put a plan in place well before a disaster occurs. Here are the five key elements to think about when creating your business disaster recovery plan:

1. Data continuity: Explore exactly what data your business requires in order to run, including what your organization needs to ensure successful operations, financial processing, availability of supplies, and communications. Grade each element in order of criticality, and identify the systems, staffing, and other factors that it depends on and influences.
2. Communication plan and role assignments: When it comes to mitigating and surviving a disaster, communication is of the essence. A plan is essential because it puts all employees on the same page with clear procedures and contact information for key stakeholders and vendors.
3. Detailed asset inventory: When it comes to a disaster and insurance, it’s crucial to have a detailed inventory of workstations, their components, servers, printers, scanners, phones, tablets, and other technologies that your organization uses. This will give you a quick reference for insurance claims after a major disaster by providing your adjuster with a simple list (with photos) of any inventory you have.
4. Plan for your equipment: It’s important that you have a plan for how to protect your equipment when a disaster happens. In case of a flood, what equipment do you need to get off the floor? During a ransomware attack, where are your backups? Do you have a secondary backup?
5. Backup testing: Regularly test to make sure that your backup is running as scheduled, and include running additional local and offsite backups on all servers and data in your disaster preparation plan. Run them as far in advance as possible, and make sure that they’re backed up to a location that will not be impacted by the disaster. If you are using a third party, are you doing regular backup testing with them? Do you know who to reach out to?

The Thrive Experience

Your Backup and Disaster Recovery Heroes

Thrive is a trusted global provider of comprehensive cloud, data protection, and security services. We have been a long-standing Veeam partner and are excited to make these latest enhancements available to our customers to further strengthen their solutions.

Since 2001, Thrive has provided robust and secure managed cloud and disaster recovery solutions from a scalable multi-tenant infrastructure, supported by our world-class in-house technical team. Thrive delivers highly flexible and responsive solutions with outstanding value and service, using state-of-the-art technology to offer ultimate protection and peace of mind.

We are driven to be your trusted partner and to ensure that we deliver a Thrive Experience that meets your business requirements with the reliability, scalability, and support that your business demands.

Have questions about IT Disaster Recovery Planning? Contact us today!