To maintain a good level of competitiveness in the market, companies need to take a better look at their processes, investments, costs and innovation strategies.
In this scenario, technology provides tools that facilitate and optimize organizational management in various aspects, making a significant contribution to achieving good results.
It is therefore essential for IT teams to be prepared to deal with possible unforeseen events that could jeopardize the progress of technology operations in companies. That's why Disaster Recovery exists.
When we talk about IT Disaster Recovery, we are referring to a set of actions that must be carried out to deal with adversities capable of negatively affecting the company, such as natural disasters, cyber attacks or even maintenance problems.
As data storage and analysis are crucial elements for assertive decision-making, IT disaster recovery is the key to keeping these elements safe and secure even after a large-scale attack or loss.
The relationship between data storage, backup and recovery
Although they are distinct concepts, in a disaster recovery plan there are three elements that should always be used together: storage, backup and disaster recovery itself.
It is extremely possible to perform a backup without a recovery strategy, but you need to have the data stored somewhere to perform the backup, which in turn is essential for disaster recovery.
In other words, recovery only occurs when data is backed up in the cloud, replicating the files stored in a pre-designated location.
The disaster recovery plan
As the incidence of cyber attacks and weather events can end up compromising a company's data and information, it becomes necessary to maintain business continuity through a disaster recovery plan.
It is a document that sets out which systems and information are essential for business continuity, as well as the emergency measures and their stages for recovering work and minimizing the interference caused by a disaster.
The metrics present in this planning guide decision-making and the IT procedures that will be required in a sudden disaster situation.
The main objectives of the disaster recovery plan are:
- Reduce business interruption
- Minimize risks of downtime and delays
- Avoiding a reduction in cash flow
- Reduce lost orders
- Avoid work overload
- Increasing the level of security
- Ensure that backup systems are reliable
- Help restore operations at speed.
The stages of an IT disaster recovery plan
Internal and external communication
At this stage, the team responsible for managing disaster recovery will determine the roles and responsibilities of each person. In this way, communication between employees and teams will become more assertive and efficient in times of emergency data recovery.
Recovery schedule
Here, the timeframes for restoring the system after a disaster will be defined. Depending on the complexity of the tasks, some sectors will recover more slowly, while others can return to normal in just a few minutes.
This schedule should address the recovery time objective (RTO), a metric that defines the maximum amount of time elapsed before completing recovery, and the recovery point objective (RPO), which indicates the maximum amount of time acceptable for data loss after a disaster.
In this case, if this metric is minutes or hours, you will need to constantly back up your data to mirror locations, in order to minimize the damage caused by possible disasters.
Data backup
At this stage, you must determine how the data will be backed up. Will it be backed up in the cloud? Will the data be managed by the cloud service provider? Will internal data be backed up by your own IT team?
By determining all these aspects, the data that will be included and how this system will be implemented, it is much easier to carry out recovery efficiently and assertively.
Testing and optimization
Once you have a disaster recovery plan in place, it is essential to test it throughout the year. From there, it will be possible to identify points for improvement, correct gaps and update data security and protection strategies to prevent possible unauthorized access and attacks.
The importance of specialists in your company's disaster recovery
Even if the organization already has an IT team to manage the backup process in disaster recovery, it is important to automate this work in order to optimize the tasks of your employees and restore activities in the shortest possible time.
Some organizations don't have an IT team specialized in disaster recovery, but this obstacle can be easily solved by partnering with companies that simplify this process.
In ConversysWe offer customized storage and backup solutions, such as Hardware Backup, Software Backup and Cloud Services, to ensure that your recovery plan will work without failure or interference.
We help you apply advanced resources to store, protect and organize your relevant information, through different manufacturers and solutions that suit your business objectives, with high-level availability, performance and security.
Store, protect and restore your data with Conversys!
At Conversys, we know how essential files are to business intelligence and the success of organizations. That's why we reinforce their protection by applying advanced storage, organization and disaster recovery security resources.
With your data always safe and available, you can better direct your efforts to other aspects of the business with all the peace of mind of having storage and backup solutions customized to your recovery strategy, in a scalable and highly effective way.
Click here and talk to a Conversys expert now!
