What Makes a Disaster Recovery Plan Complete?

The biggest problem with most disaster recovery plans is that they’re incomplete. If you forget just one component, then you may not be able to restore your business operations. Here are three factors that you can’t afford to skip: 

Prioritize your services

When it comes to disaster recovery, prioritizing your services is key. Some things carry more weight than others in terms of your business operations, and you need to take care of them first. 

According to a recent Register article, it’s especially important for small businesses to prioritize their services: 

“Unless it is purely a services or IP-based company, a small business that burns down is not coming back for months. Disaster recovery for SMBs like this is mostly focused on keeping a few critical services running with the goal of being able to retrieve relevant data for insurance and regulatory purposes.”

Back up and be able to retrieve data

There’s no such thing as a disaster recovery plan that doesn’t entail data backup. The reason many businesses fail after disasters is because they can’t recover their data.

Still, while backing your data up is crucial, it’s only half of the equation. You also need to be able to restore it in a short time frame. The longer you go without data, the more money you’ll lose as a result of business downtime. 

Have a way to communicate internally and externally 

Communication is something that businesses don’t always think about in terms of disaster recovery. But in case something happens to your office, you need a way to talk to your employees and clients. 

VoIP phones are a simple solution to this problem. Since you can physically remove these and plug them in wherever there’s Internet access, you won’t have to leave business partners in the dark. 

 

These three factors don’t encompass all of disaster recovery, but focusing on them will steer you in the right direction. To talk more about disaster recovery, or anything else, please contact us. Thanks.