4 Ways to Avoid a Data Catastrophe When Planning Your Disaster Recovery

When was the last time you put some serious thought into your data backup and disaster recovery strategy? Can your business handle a sudden loss of data, and if so, how long would it take your organization to recover and get back in the swing of things? While there are several ways you can approach the concept of data backup, only one of them will be the best choice for your business. So, how do you go about making such an important decision?

One way you can make sure you’re approaching backup and disaster recovery in an educated fashion is by understanding what causes even the best equipment to fail and what your options are in regards to instituting a comprehensive data backup and recovery solution. Here are four often-overlooked concepts of backup and disaster recovery that absolutely need to be considered to facilitate the proper continuity of your business.

What Does Your Current Backup Situation Look Like?
Naturally, the first step toward improving your backup and disaster recovery practices is to consider your current system. Do you have one? If not, why? Your business shouldn’t move forward with the assumption that nothing bad will ever happen to your data. It’s not a question of if your data will be destroyed or compromised; rather, it’s when it will be. Even the most cautious organization will run into situations, like natural disasters, hacking attacks, or even user error, where their data becomes lost and needs to be recovered. This is why it’s important to always have a comprehensive backup and disaster recovery plan.

How Often Do You Test Your Backups?
Even if you have a backup system in place, how often do you test your backups to make sure they will work properly when you need them most? It’s not unheard of for a business to lose everything in a fire, and when attempting a recovery, they find out that the entire backup is corrupted or doesn’t work properly. You shouldn’t just be hoping that your backups will work fine. You need to guarantee that they will. It’s your business’s future on the line, so you owe it to yourself to make sure your organization won’t fail due to negligence.

Is There a Single Point of Failure?
Many complex systems stem from a specific source, and if that source is destroyed, the complex system collapses under the sheer weight of its infrastructure. Is your business at risk of this happening? In other words, do you have multiple ways to access information, or is it all located in one central hub that is at a high risk? Your IT infrastructure shouldn’t be brought down by the failure of a single server. This is why it’s recommended that you take advantage of both cloud technology and virtualization services to always be ready for the worst-case scenario.

Is Your Technology Placed in Vulnerable Locations?
It doesn’t take much to destroy a piece of technology under the right conditions. All it takes is a flood or a power surge to fry a server unit or workstation. If your organization is located in an area known for fierce storms, hurricanes, or even simple rainfall, you should make every effort to elevate your technology. Similarly, you don’t want to overload your electrical circuits and cause a power outage. One way to remediate this is with an Uninterrupted Power Supply, or a UPS. This makes sure that your servers and workstations are properly shut down following a loss of power, helping to minimize data loss.

One of the best ways to protect your data and IT systems is to contact Computerware and ask about our Backup and Disaster Recovery (BDR) solution. We can equip your business with the tools necessary to ensure minimal data loss. Our BDR solution is designed to keep your business operating, even under the worst circumstances. It can even act as a server in the event of a hardware failure or similar loss. Give us a call at (703) 821-8200 to learn more.