The end of the calendar year is the perfect time to block out an hour (or a few hours) to blow the dust off your Disaster Recovery Plan and update it. If you don’t have one, take a stab at assembling some basics now so you can paint a picture of “who” does “what” in the event of an IT outage or disaster. Here are a few pointers to help you get through the DR Plan update process.
Document new apps or equipment.
Be sure to ask department heads about any new applications they are using. Application sprawl is rampant these days. The marketing department may have three new apps creating important data that you didn’t know you needed to protect!
- Were any new applications rolled out in your organization?
- What is in place to protect the data for these new apps?
Were any new servers or hardware deployed this year?
- Physical Equipment?
- Virtual Machines?
Re-evaluate the priorities of each app on your application list.
After you have a handle on any apps and IT gear added, now it’s time to re-evaluate the priority level of each application so budget is not spent on protecting the wrong applications.
What priority level would you assign each one of your apps in production?
- Your legacy ERP platform may have been classified as “critical” the last time you looked at your Disaster Recovery Plan.
Have the business requirements changed?
- We’ve found many organizations that could live with 24-hour recovery time objectives (RTO) can no longer afford more than 8 hours of downtime.
Are the protection solutions in line with our business requirements?
- Do you need to add Rapid Server Recovery or High Availability?
If you only get through these few steps, you’ve gone a long way toward strengthening the resiliency of your organization. If you find that your plan is too outdated or you don’t have a formal IT Disaster Recovery Plan, now is the time to get in front of this issue before a disaster or data loss event strikes.
Happy Planning!
Chuck and the Team
RenovoData
RenovoData is a leading regulatory-compliant, cloud data protection IT services company. Our solutions range from File and Database Backup, Server Recovery, Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS), Custom Cloud Hosting and Consulting solutions for on-premises and hosted environments.