6 Steps to successful Disaster Recovery
Putting some thinking into Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity Planning can save your business a lot of time, money and worry when a catastrophe strikes.
Obviously, disasters can take many forms - from you being unable to use your office during a gas leak to a failed server to recovery from a health issue.
Typically we have 6 steps that might help you plan for a disaster.
- Critical Jobs. Decide on your critical employees, categorise them by role and responsibility, also find out where they might work from in the event of instigating a DR plan
- Necessary Equipment. Part of working in remote locations with little notice will be access to IT, and also mundane things like desks and chairs. Think about temporary offices in the locality.
- Back up Important Files. Most businesses these days run on data, whether it be accounts, sales or web. You must have a good backup plan - and be able to restore everything if you office is offline.
- Outsource anything that might give you time to regroup. Telephone answering is the simple to do and would allow a number of remote employees to be handed calls from a central switchboard. Other options would be getting your website and email redirected by ISP to a local IT company
- Budget. Have an understanding of how much relocation and purchasing new equipment will cost you. Your insurance assessor will be much happier with numbers to look at.
- Using Your Recovery Plan. Document the plan and make sure everyone has a hard copy. Use it.
