Is Old Man Winter Part of Your Disaster Recovery Plan?

So far in 2020:

In Canada, Newfoundland was hit with a huge blizzard that produced 75 centimeters of snow in a single day with wind gusts of up to 150 kilometers an hour, knocking out power, unleashing an avalanche, and burying the Avalon and Bonavista peninsulas in deep snow. The storm caused a state of emergency and even the military has been called in to help dig residents out.

Meanwhile, the northeast US was hit with a huge storm including snow, rain, and then more snow, and left cities like Boston slick with ice.

Across the globe we’ve seen powerful winter snow, rain and windstorms in Spain, causing civilian evacuations to escape from heavy flooding of the coastal towns. Unfortunately, there’s no such escape possible for brick and mortar businesses. Crippling bushfires, ash rain, and flash floods have devastated huge swaths of land in Australia, destroying wilderness and towns alike. As if that wasn’t bad enough, the Australian winds produced dust storms and thunderstorms across central New South Wales , producing conditions and lightning that sparked even more bush fires in a self-perpetuating firestorm catastrophe.

It’s probably no surprise that these extreme and increasingly common weather conditions can make equipment maintenance more difficult, and power outages even more likely. The latest storms are winter’s friendly reminder, whether your region is facing record snowfall, or just one bad storm, that your organization’s disaster recovery plan needs to be ready.

Preparing for Winter Disaster Recovery

As natural disasters continue to grow in scale, longevity, and geographic footprint, companies of all sizes and all locations need to prepare for the chance of a weather-related natural disaster by turning to cloud for disaster recovery. Cloud disaster recovery provides geographical diversity along with quick recovery times to keep your company running reliably. If a winter disaster like a blizzard or flood strikes your main data center, your cloud resources will escape its effects.

Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) enables your company to replicate data and deploy a backup environment without needing to construct a second physical data center. Continuous data protection ensures that your production site and DR site are in sync, allowing you to meet Recovery Point Objectives (RPO). DRaaS also allows for full recovery in the cloud in just minutes, giving your organization the Recovery Time Objective (RTO) that you need for true business continuity.

Your Winter Disaster Recovery Plan should include:

• Identifying mission-critical business applications and data. These are services at the top of your recovery priority list when something goes wrong. Identifying the key services and applications you must get back online, the order of their recovery, and the process of recovery helps to ensure that your business can continue doing business with minimum downtime.
• Testing processes and equipment, even if you’ve never had downtime. Testing communications processes in a DR scenario and ability to access sites and systems through remote access. This also means including equipment testing as a part of your regular maintenance checks. This should cover physical on-site equipment such as generators. Work with your service providers to make sure that they’re doing the same.
• Being transparent with staff, even if they aren’t critical to your winter disaster recovery plan and protocol. When employees across all departments know exactly what to do when systems go down, you’ll be able to get back up and running as quickly – and efficiently – as possible.

Need more help with preparing your winter disaster recovery plan? Read our Backup and Recovery Plan blog article!

Winter-proof Your Business – Thrive Can Help!

After a natural disaster, you can feel confident that you are making decisions based on accurate, complete, and current data with Thrive’s services. Before Old Man Winter starts knocking the power out with blizzards, floods, ice storms, hurricanes, and other nasty winter hijinks, be sure to bring your disaster recovery plan up to date with the help of your Thrive experts. Contact us to learn more about the Old Man Winter Disaster Recovery Plan.

There is a wide range of options available to IT teams in choosing a backup strategy and system for their organization. At Thrive, we work to keep your environment protected and accessible. Our goal is to keep your organization open for business despite whatever adverse events come your way.

Thrive’s solutions and responsive support enable your in-house IT team to minimize disruptions and ensure smooth operations and business continuity, even in the face of Old Man Winter.

We make sure that your data and IT systems are available and ready to resume operations so that you can continue to provide uninterrupted service to your customers no matter what the weather brings. Contact us to learn more.