4 Quick Tips About Disaster Recovery and Outsourced IT

The ultimate expectation of disaster recovery is to have as little downtime as possible.

And since there’s no perfect way to plan for the future, especially for a disaster that affects your technology, the best advice we can give you to achieve this expectation is to take the steps you need in order to best ensure your data is secure and easily recoverable.

We want to give you an understanding of the best methods to implement in your backup and disaster recovery plan, (BDR) through an outsourced IT provider that ultimately helps you have as little downtime as possible, when lightning strikes. (no pun intended)

And because BDR plans differ from business to business, but there are some foundational rules for what you should expect from your IT provider, assuming you outsource some of your IT services.

So here are 4 quick tips of what disaster recovery should look like, inside your organization.

Inventory your data.

One reason it might be difficult for your organization to recover, when in the middle of some sort of downtime or disaster, is because your customer/client data is affected. When you have customer data that you can’t access, a few things happen.

• You can’t bill them for projects, or services.
• You can’t contact them in order to process transactions.
• Contact info many be damaged, permanently lost, or worse, compromised.
• Sales and marketing could be affected.
• You’ll lose precious time and money.

There’s also a very high cost experiencing downtime. Here’s a formula we like to use:

Cost of Downtime (per hour) = Lost Revenue

Cost of Downtime = Cost of Intangibles (i.e. Reputation Cost) + Cost to Recover + Lost Productivity.

If you don’t have access to data relating to your customers or clients, it won’t take long before your revenue and operations are negatively affected. A comprehensive backup and disaster recovery plan ensures customer data is backed up, preventing any sort of loss to your business.

How susceptible are you.

Whether you are the IT person inside your company, or you have disaster recovery outsourced to an IT firm, you should be assessing what your technology weaknesses are.

Some of the questions to ask, to identify your weaknesses would be:

• Is our system accessible to the public?
• Are we protecting information that is attractive to cyber attackers?
• What are the risks to our system?

Technology that’s susceptible doesn’t mean attackers will target it. But you should still ask yourself if there are any points of access to your information that an attacker can exploit.

Threat analysis.

Ideally, you need to have an understanding of what a security breach could mean for your business, and the possible outcomes if your data is compromised.

You don’t want to live in fear, but you need to understand that all servers face data-breach risks. It really comes down to the level of security you and your outsourced IT partner employ.

As a part of your overall threat analysis, you’ll want to have a well-established, multi-layered security approach that protects your servers until your managed service company can address the breakdown. If you don’t have this, we’d encourage you to work with your outsourced IT company to secure all data access points of your organization, both virtual and physical, to make sure they’re protected.

Communication.

The ultimate responsibility of your company’s data and security of your data, no matter if you employ an outsourced IT company or not, falls on you and your business. And even though much of the stress falls on you, it’s still a collaborative effort. That said, you need to be aware of your backup data recovery plan, when handling your important information, and this begins with effective communication.

When choosing an IT company to do business with, be sure and research them and examine their services, experiences, and certifications. You want to work with an IT firm that has worked with your industry, as they’ll understand what your technology needs are and provide the best solution for your company. This type of communication comes with years of experience and trust from other organizations in your industry.

Don’t stress from disaster recovery or your outsourced IT needs.

For guidance on how to solve these types of IT issues, email us here, where we’ll share with you how you can make your outsourced IT journey a bit easier.