Business continuity plans aren’t worth a whole lot if they don’t work. And you cannot know whether or not they work unless you test them.
So that’s my fifth step toward business disaster preparedness: Test your plan — often.
Testing your plan frequently is essential. Change has a way of sneaking up on organizations, and those changes can disrupt your carefully laid plan to overcome disruptions. Fortunately, the right service provider will include regular testing in the price of your service.
Okay, so your data is properly backed up, you’re monitoring its use, you’re developing a plan to protect your business and recover as quickly as possible from events beyond your control.
Now, in conjunction with your planning efforts, you need to pinpoint and then implement the most cost-effective disruption recovery solutions necessary to sustain business-critical operations when your systems and networks are down and/or when your office is unusable. This entails a three-step process that requires business continuity/disaster recovery expertise:
Selling technology solutions means your outcomes will be more complex and will require greater technical reach and expertise.
Your focus shifts from dangling the lowest commodity prices before an ever-churning customer base to providing technology that’s so effective at improving business processes and solving business problems that your customers turn to you again and again. This brings you into deeper, longer-term relationships with your customers. And the customers you engage will typically be key decision-makers, such as CFOs and CEOs.
By definition, no event that interrupts your organization’s operations is trivial, so when it comes to preparing for disaster that might impact your business IT, you need a plan that addresses all emergencies that could disrupt your business. To create an effective plan, you’ll need to:
If you don’t know much about your data, backing it up can be a challenge . Important data can be missed if it’s been squirreled away in some obscure location. And corrupted and/or hacked data can be taken as legitimate, backed up, and given an opportunity to re-infect other data and apps.
Fortunately, it’s a challenge that can be met with data loss prevention solutions that…
I can hear it now: A chorus of “Duh!”
And yes, “ back up your data ” is pretty obvious. But some of the details that go into it are not. So here they are:
