Most business owners don’t normally think they will be a victim of a disaster, not until an unforeseen crisis happens. These disasters are not just catastrophic events such as hurricanes, earthquakes, and tornados but also cybersecurity attacks or even equipment failure. In today’s world, it’s imperative that companies and organizations prepare for these types of events by creating disaster recovery plans that detail actions to take and processes to following to resume mission-critical functions quickly and without major losses in revenue or business.
First and foremost, what is disaster recovery? Disaster recovery is a plan for restoring and accessing your data in the event of a disaster that destroys all or a part of your organizations’ resources. Regardless of the organization’s size, when an unforeseen event takes place and causes day-to-day operations to come to a halt, a company will need to recover as quickly as possible to ensure they’ll continue providing services to clients and customers. Downtime is one of the bigger IT expenses that any business can face.
How do I create a Disaster Recovery plan for my business? Creating, implementing and maintaining a total business recovery plan is time-consuming but is extremely important for a company. According to a summary of the State of Disaster Recovery Report, two out of five companies still don’t have a documented disaster recovery plan and only 40% test their disaster recovery plans once a year. If you don’t test your disaster recovery plan, you don’t have one.
When creating a disaster recovery plan, there are a few key metrics that your organization needs to be aware of to ensure your strategy is successful. Recovery Point Objective (RPO) and Recovery Time Objective (RTO) are two of the most essential elements of a disaster recovery plan.
- Recovery Point Objective (RPO) is the interval of downtime or disruption before the quantity of data lost exceeds its threshold. A businesses RPO should become the indicator of how often you back up your data or save your work. If your business can survive three to four days in between backups, then your RPO would be three days – the shortest time between backups.
- Recovery Time Objective (RTO) is the amount of time it takes to recover after downtime before the disruption begins to seriously and unacceptably delay the flow of normal business hours. For example, if you find your RTO is only five hours then your business needs to create an in-depth strategy and implement a large budget so your business won’t exceed five hours of downtime. If however, your RTO is two week, then you can most likely budget less and invest is less intensive solutions.
Many organizations don’t have the time or resources to dedicate to creating and implementing a disaster recovery strategy. If you would like to protect your organization from unexpected disasters but need guidance, contact our experts today.
