The day you were dreading has finally arrived. It could be that an unexpected power interruption has damaged your infrastructure, perhaps a ransomware attack has corrupted critical data, or maybe even a natural disaster has affected your place of business. It is time for your disaster recovery plan to be implemented. So what, exactly, can you do to prepare your enterprise for a return to a semblance of normal operations?
You will absolutely need a team of “first responders” who take ownership of the process of restoring normal operations. While this needs to include senior members of your information technology team, it may also need to include members of your team in charge of physical infrastructure, such as a facilities manager, depending on the scope of the interruption. It must also include a single member of senior management who will act as the single point of contact, and then be responsible for disseminating information to the rest of your enterprise. Nothing slows down a disaster response like having to report to multiple points of contact.
You also need regular testing of your protocols. Just like in the case of fire drills, you do not want to find out during the emergency that certain parts of your plan do not work. Have all the steps of a disaster recovery operation in writing (in the cloud, obviously), and mandate at least quarterly testing with representative potential failures, whether compromised data or system-wide failures. If you discover pain points (and you will), amend your plan until all runs smoothly.
If all this seems excessive, think again. Data from 2017 (when ransomware attacks were much less frequent than they are today) indicates that, after a ransomware attack, businesses that lacked a disaster recovery plan experienced a 90% failure rate—that is, 90% of the businesses that suffered such an attack without a plan in place to recover and mitigate, went out of business after the attack. Other systemic interruptions without disaster recovery planning suffered similar recovery numbers.
NSC Information Technology Group specializes in assisting businesses like yours in developing and implementing a comprehensive backup and disaster recovery plan. Contact us today and stop worrying about whether or not your enterprise is protected.