Business Continuity – What is Disaster Recovery?

Disaster Recovery can mean many things to different people. In the technology realm, it is the plan you need to have in place to be prepared for disaster, either human-induced or natural disaster. Disaster recovery is often overlooked for small- to mid-sized business, but the importance is paramount nonetheless. 3 things (at minimum) your Disaster recovery plan should cover are below:

–Data. What data does your company absolutely depend on to function? How much money could your company afford to lose if disaster should strike? How long can your company be down? You must establish a RTO (Recovery time Objective) and RPO (recovery Point Objective) as an integral part of your DR plan.

–Physical Hardware Do you have physical servers on site at your company? Would your company suffer if your hardware failed eminently? Do you have redundancy in place where you would not lose information if your location went down? (We will discuss redundancy in our next Tech Talk)

–Business critical software. What software does your company use? If it is an ERP or accounting software, can your company function if it was down completely? Does your company use industry-specific proprietary software? Do you have a support contract that guarantees uptime and/or functionality? All of the above are absolutely important things to your DR plan, and the Business Continuity plan on the whole. A word to the wise-use a third party consultant like Merit Technologies to develop a cohesive Business Continuity plan for your business. You can’t afford not to!