Your managed IT services provider in West Palm Beach should be able to walk you through the disaster recovery plan (DRP) they've devised to protect your data in the event of an emergency. It's a step-by-step plan for what to do if your data is ever in danger due to a natural or man-made disaster. They should be able to give you a ball-park estimate on downtime. If this plan doesn't meet your expectations, you need to move on to a company that offers you more peace of mind and understands the need to test the DRP.
Why BDR Testing Is Important
Many companies still try to avoid BDR for various reasons, such as tight budgets, lack of resources or failure of management to agree on a plan. If you do have a plan it still needs to be regularly tested by your managed IT services provider in West Palm Beach. This testing, whether it's simple or complex, takes time and must be planned. Part of the purpose of testing is to learn how to make refinements. Another reason is so that a recovery team completely understands their duties. Some plans are over a hundred pages of procedures.
There are many types of disasters that can occur, such as hardware or software failure, a data center issue or a regional power outage. Testing will provide comfort that the plan will work regardless of the type of disaster. The plan must constantly be revisited to make sure it's up-to-date. It should be a thorough checklist of goals to ensure business continuity and should identify critical IT systems. The plan should explain how bandwidth will be restored if the data center suffers a massage power outage. Here are other elements the plan should address:
- DR policy statement and plan goals
- Authentication tools including passwords
- Financial and legal strategies
- List of geographical risks
- Log of how the plan has evolved
How BDR Affects IT Services
IT teams must always be aware of worst case scenarios in case of power failure or a security breach. They must stay on top of system vulnerabilities and take a proactive approach to preventing disasters. Part of this strategy is to review the business' history with unplanned incidents and outages and determine how well they were handled.
Part of developing a disaster recovery plan is identifying the emergency response team and defining what the roles will be for team members. The plan should explain in detail specific actions that must be taken to restore the business to its normal operation. It needs to be as efficient as possible at restoring access to data to limit downtime.
Steps for Refining DR Plans
- Identify current vulnerabilities and DR strategies
- Create a BDR plan
- Test the plan with the IT team and staff
- Update the plan to address and fix weaknesses
Conclusion
If you've asked your managed IT services provider in West Palm Beach about DRP and have decided you need a better system, contact us at Nexxen Technologies, Inc. to learn more. We make DRP an important priority and test the plan so that it's a strong solution to keep your business running and growing.