When it comes to data backup and disaster recovery, preparation is paramount. Preparing your organisation before disaster strikes is key to maintaining business continuity and limiting downtime.
With OASIS’ easy to follow Disaster Recovery Checklist your organisation can prepare for unforeseen events
Understand what you currently have in place. When analysing your existing business continuity solution consider:
Visit our business continuity FAQs for further insight.
Identify potential hazards and the most likely sources of a data loss/breach or failure. Are threats likely to be limited to one machine, or will it affect entire systems. By knowing your risks you can evaluate the most critical systems and their underlying hardware and software vulnerabilities.
Gauge the likely impact of a disaster on your organisation by identifying the most common trigger events and documenting the potential financial, operational and reputational consequences such events are likely to incur.
Identify critical systems and prioritise recovery tasks. Identify which information you should recover from (ie. which restore points to use). Identify a suitable duration for your disaster recovery process – taking into account the cost of downtime to your organisation. (Please note: With our business continuity service, you can recover your data within 6 seconds and our service allows backups to take place as regular as every 5 minutes, reducing any live data loss to a minimum).
Develop a disaster recovery procedure that is consistent with your end goal – be that file restore, local virtualisation or off-site virtualisation. A one size fits all approach might not be best, clearly identify the incidents under which a disaster recovery plan will be invoked and identify under which circumstances full or partial recoveries are necessary. Ensure that any plan provides an orderly resumption of services prioritising the business units or functions according to their needs.
This team would be responsible for implementing an operational contingency plan if disaster strikes. OASIS’ business continuity service reduces the need for this requirement by providing an offsite business continuity team who proactively manage your backups and recoveries from a remote location, when needed.
The incident response report should:
Identify what precipitated the failure, which ongoing issues need to be addressed, what can be done better in future disaster recovery scenarios and how have standards and protocols changed post disaster.
Verify the recovery and functionality with users once the backup is complete. (ie make sure that all users can access resources and applications)
Your business continuity plan should be continually tested and updated, making sure to identify any deficiencies and ensure its future viability. With OASIS’ business continuity service this is provided as a matter of course, through an annual “proof of concept” full restoration exercise, complete with post-event report.
Find out more about our business continuity service
If you would like to speak with a disaster recovery specialist please use our online form or email info@oasisgroup.com.
