By Trevor O’Bryan, Owner, Pterabyte Tech Solutions
The importance of disaster recovery planning can not be emphasized enough. Unfortunately, many companies do not realize what a priority disaster recovery should be until it is too late. Anyone who has lost their data to natural disasters, hardware failures, viruses, employee mistakes, or any other cause, knows that the consequences can be catastrophic. Depending on the nature of the company, data loss can even lead to businesses closing their doors for good.
Fortunately, the market is full of powerful solutions designed to backup any size infrastructure. There are options for backing up select data and files, full volumes or disks, or even entire data centers. Furthermore, there are backup solutions designed for sending your data to local storage, network storage, the cloud, or to offsite locations. As well as options for virtual machines, physical machines, mobile phones, and on and on. Finding the right solution with all of these choices can be very daunting. In order to cut through all of the noise, there are a few core consideration everyone should think about when making their BDR plan.
1. Know your needs
The first step to devising your backup and disaster recovery plan is to set realistic goals based on your budget and the needs of your company. Some questions to ask yourself: How much will downtime cost my company? What is my budget for software? How much data is absolutely critical to the company? How much storage do I need? These types of questions will help in making decisions on software, and help you prepare a budget for expenses like storage, hardware and software.
2. Location, Location, Location
The location that the backups are stored is extremely important. It is almost always necessary to have an onsite backup and an offsite or cloud based backup in case of disaster. Consider the difficulty and time it will take to retrieve your data from its location. It is also important that the location of the backup is secured, and the data is encrypted. Don’t let your data backups be a point of weakness in your network security. You will also want to consider if you are going to need to be able to boot a backup image directly from the storage location, to limit downtime as much as possible.
3. Test your recovery plan
Always test your recovery plan. Make sure backups are completing successfully by testing them out in a test environment. Continue to test and update your hardware and software, to ensure that everything will be in order when you need to recover your data, and you will know exactly what to do.
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