Developing a disaster recovery plan is one of the essential considerations to make when hiring IT consulting services. If your disaster recovery plan is insufficient, outdated, or nonexistent, you need to create one immediately.
Step By Step: IT Consulting Services for Disaster Recovery
A comprehensive disaster recovery plan will speed up recovery from an attack and minimize the impact of a disaster on business continuity and data loss. Attacks can happen to any network bringing everything to a halt.
However, with a DR plan, your company will be up and running in a matter of hours. The key concerns when dealing with a disaster include business continuity, compliance, and data loss. Below are five steps for developing a comprehensive plan that’ll protect these areas.
1. Audit IT Network and Resources
Every business network infrastructure has unique assets required to maintain optimal operations. Before you start planning for recovery, it is vital to know what optimal (normal) operation looks like and what the business can’t do without.
You can work with an experienced IT consultancy company to help you audit all assets and create a well-organized inventory of all IT resources used in your network. However, consolidating the resources is only the first step.
A full audit requires understanding each IT resource and determining the crucial data to ensure smooth backup and recovery. Your processes will likely carry a lot of data, including redundant information that you don’t need to backup.
Working with an IT company can help you complete a comprehensive audit, consolidate the crucial data, and backup only what’s needed. This will save you storage space and unnecessary expenses when it comes time for disaster recovery.
2. Establish Responsibilities for Everyone
Establishing a recovery team with documented responsibilities is essential. Each employee should know their role in the event of a disaster. A simple act like reporting a suspected attack will go a long way in preventing worse-case scenarios.
The DR team’s work is to spearhead the recovery efforts, whether through information dissemination or rolling out the actual plan. The plan is more likely to succeed if everyone knows how to respond to the emergency, so establishing team roles is crucial.
You can involve IT consultants to help inform role distribution and train your teams on the specific tasks they will be expected to carry out. The goal is to ensure everyone has a clear understanding of their responsibilities and knows who is responsible for what.
3. Set Reasonable Recovery Goals
Setting clear recovery time/point objectives (RTOs and RPOs) is paramount for effective recovery. There are various questions to answer, ranging from how fast your business should recover to what data you can lose before operations freeze.
Regulatory compliance and financial data like accounts payable/receivable are mission-critical. Such data require shorter recovery time and point objectives, and frequent backups to minimize interruption when there’s a disaster.
Conversely, less vital data that doesn’t need immediate access can have longer RTOs and low priority assignments with less frequent backups. You should involve an IT expert to help align your recovery objectives with business needs to reduce downtime and buffer critical data.
4. Use Remote Backup Solutions
Information backup is at the heart of every DR plan. Without a proper backup strategy, you may lose information forever when faced with an attack, such as ransomware. Finding remote storage for mission-critical data is vital in guaranteeing business continuity.
You can backup data frequently or invest in a separate production server that’ll take when the main server is down. Make sure you engage an IT consultant to draft down the ideal backup solutions for your business operations.
In addition to remote storage, you should create a detailed blueprint of the network and infrastructure. Comprehensive infrastructure documentation will make it a tad easier to rebuild everything to the pre-disaster state, especially if the network suffered a cyber attack.
5. Test the DR Plan
Having a recovery plan is worthless if it doesn’t work. As such, you should test the process to gauge whether it will work as intended or requires refining. You should have a checklist of recovery plan initiation criteria and make sure the recovery process is documented.
An IT consultancy company can run simulations for different disasters to ensure your plan is updated and capable of handling a real-life event. As a rule of thumb, you should run partial simulations at least twice a year and full drills annually.
Testing the plan will ensure you have a reliable process. It also identifies new ways to improve the plan and approach for better success rates. When running drills, focus on single points of failure, recovery time, recovery point, and different disasters.
Reliable IT Consulting Services in NYC
Developing a disaster recovery plan seems like a lot of work and requires careful assessment of the network infrastructure and operations. The best solution is to work with a reputable IT consulting firm like Haber Group.
The company has been serving businesses in NYC since 2000 and focuses on providing enterprise-level services and technology management for SMBs. Their approach focuses on the business, brand, and people.
