Emerging Disaster Recovery Technology to Protect your Business

The task of preparing your business for an unexpected disaster is a big one. With the increased role played by technology in day to day affairs of a business, it becomes top priority to chalk out a disaster recovery plan that shall come into force in the event of a disaster hitting out on your data.

To use disaster recovery technology effectively, it is important to know what all goes into making an infallible recovery plan that works in the face of a disaster. The key factors that need to be paid attention to while chalking out a disaster recovery plan are:

1. Data Continuity

Maintenance of data continuity is another important factor that needs due attention. It is imperative that the applications and processes keep running in continuity in the event of a disaster or otherwise. With such continuity as an objective in mind, it becomes easy to pre-plan responses and strategies to maintain continuity of data.

2. Analyzing your unique risks

Each business is unique in its practices of dealing with data. This brings in the necessity of a thorough analysis of the unique risks that the data may be subjected to due to its unique handling by the owner. Different business may be victims of different types of disasters and hence the technology employed to either avert those disasters or to recover the data needs to be tailored according to the risk posed.

3. Understanding critical business functions

Different functions of a business use data differently and hence need different kind of protection and recovery plans. There may be a few business functions that may be more critical than the other and may completely shut down in the absence of data should a disaster strike while there may be others that can survive for sometime without data. The critical ones will require immediate data recovery where as the non critical ones will not. It is therefore wise to know the critical functions of a business to avoid being caught off guard when a disaster strikes.

4. Recovery Point Objectives

You must know the extent of data recovery that you wish to go for before making a plan. Since even the least down time is enough to take a heavy toll on the profitability of the business, make sure you have decided how far back do you wish to recover data and what loss shall be acceptable to you.

5. Recovery Time Objectives

Any business will have a certain recovery time objective which is essentially the duration of time it can afford to spend on data recovery without being a victim of unacceptable losses due to break in business continuity. If the business does not know the recovery time objective, it will be difficult for the recovery plan to be effective in salvaging the business against a disaster.

There are a number of IT vendors who offer their disaster recovery technology to tailor a recovery plan for your business. They also test their recovery plans for efficacy regularly to maintain their sharpness. With all the above mentioned pre-requisites of preparing a disaster recovery plan, it shall not be an overstatement to say that careful thought and planning are required to make a sound disaster recovery plan.

Author Bio:

Deney Dentel is the CEO at Nordisk Systems, Inc., a managed server virtualization and cloud computing service provider company in Portland, OR. Deney is the only localised and authorised  IBM business partner in Pacific Northwest. You can also follow him on LinkedIn.