If Disaster Strikes, Will You Be Able to Stay in Business?

An earthquake strikes, cutting power to your data center. A pipe breaks, flooding your office and cutting its communications. An employee mistakenly loads a virus to your network, causing an outage. These scenarios are obviously very different in scope and severity, but they have one thing in common: They can cripple your business if you’re not prepared.

But, no one really wants to focus on disaster recovery and business continuity. After all, they’re only required after something has gone terribly wrong, right?

Of course, we all know that every company must prepare for the unfortunate time when—not if, when—outages occur, for any reason. But where to begin? For organizations with limited resources, preparing for disaster can seem like a daunting task.

It doesn’t have to be. By following these four disaster planning essentials, your company can get a great start on what will be a continuously evolving business continuity plan.

If your outage is caused by an emergency, communicating with employees could be difficult. So, you must have a communication plan in place that addresses two critical issues: how the company will ensure employee safety during a disaster, and how it will communicate essential information during an event, disaster, or otherwise.

This plan requires a variety of information, including up-to-date employee contact information (email, phone, etc.). It must be well documented, easy to access, and stored in multiple secure locations.

It also must have a method for contacting employees. Email is the natural first choice, but in a disaster situation, email might not be an option. So, having a backup plan, such as a phone tree, is important.

No matter how you choose to contact employees, your plan should be detailed enough that it can be carried out if the plan’s creator is not available, and it must be flexible enough to account for many potential situations—from an outage caused by an employee mistake to a true disaster like a fire or flood.

Just as employees have to be kept in the loop, so do customers. Obviously, customers require different information than employees, and different customers may require different information.

Now, you probably don’t want to alert your customers every time you have a slight glitch in your IT operations. But when an event might affect them, it is essential to communicate the details of the issue and explain the steps you are taking to mitigate it.

This communication can take many different forms: individual contact, broad social media updates, or something in between. And be prepared to deal with incoming communications—phone calls, support tickets, emails, etc.—in a timely and effective manner. You have to make sure all these avenues are up and available for customers to use as soon as possible.

How you communicate with customers during an outage, both outbound and inbound, can have a great impact on your bottom line. Mishandling even one incident can have a real, adverse affect on your business.

While IT isn’t the only aspect of disaster recovery and business continuity, there’s no denying that it’s a major concern. Until recently, traditional disaster recovery and business continuity solutions have been complex, expensive, and labor intensive. As a result, many SMBs didn’t even have a business continuity solution in place. Now, thanks to the cloud and virtual server backup, there are more realistic options that enable an organization of any size to protect itself.

Today, users can run applications from image-based backups of virtual machines. This is commonly referred to as “recovery-in-place” or “instant recovery,” and it allows operations to continue while primary servers are being restored. Snapshot-based, incremental backups at 15-minute intervals are a common practice. Virtual machine images can also be replicated to an alternate site or the cloud for disaster recovery.

Even with these new technologies, some SMBs don’t have the resources to take these steps on their own, or simply don’t want to direct valuable IT time towards the issue. They have a point; sometimes IT resources are best spent on projects dedicated to the core of what a company does. In these cases, outsourcing is now an option.

Disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS) offers the disaster recovery and business continuity capabilities a company needs at a more budget-friendly price point. In this model, users typically pay a monthly subscription fee based on the amount of data they are storing in the cloud. Compare that with the facilities, staff, and technology expenses associated with setting up a secondary data center and the value of recovery-in-place, and DRaaS can be compelling. Most outsourcing services like these are now available through managed service providers (MSPs), so look around and compare different options.

OK, you have a plan to alert employees and customers in the case of an outage, and you have a disaster recovery solution in place. You’re set, right? No. Complacency is almost as bad as not having solutions at all. Testing is the crucial final piece of the business continuity puzzle.

For employees, it means running rehearsals to find gaps in the plan, like outdated employee lists or contact information. For customers, testing is the only way to identify and fix things like customer support weaknesses and choke points, and communications infrastructure issues.

For IT, testing has traditionally been tough to execute, and risky. After all, a test required actual downtime. But, with the new solutions discussed here, testing can be performed regularly—and can even be automated. Virtual servers can be created easily, so users can set up DR test environments without the risk of harming production systems. In fact, some DRaaS providers will perform DR testing for clients.

A true disaster is one of the great fears of any business, but by setting up a disaster plan, your business can be prepared for whatever comes your way. This not only provides peace of mind, it improves your bottom line. And if disaster strikes, it can have you back up and running in no time.

Post by: Rob Rae

Rob Rae is vice president of business development at Datto , where he leads efforts to help the company’s channel partners grow their businesses. He also oversees partner development, partner programs, training, and the annual Datto Partner Conference. With more than 25 years of channel sales and B2B activities, Rob has extensive experience in IT hardware and software sales with value-added resellers, managed service providers, and other channel-focused organizations.

Company: Datto
Website: www.datto.com
Connect with me on Facebook , Twitter , and LinkedIn.

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