Disasters Happen
On Oct. 29, 2012, Hurricane Sandy tore through the eastern coast of the United States, causing heavy damage to the New Jersey coastline and New York City. On Oct. 30, the superstorm left 8 million Americans without power, thousands without homes, highways closed, and subway systems flooded. Sandy’s 90 mph winds spanned more than 1,100 miles, making it the largest Atlantic hurricane on record. At least 125 deaths and $63 billion (and counting) in economic losses were left in the
hurricane’s wake.
1: PREPARE FOR LONG-TERM AND WIDESPREAD POWER LOSS
Many buildings were left without power for 6-9 weeks. Even if your offices are not destroyed and all of your servers are fine, without power you still can’t work. We can boot up the backup images of your servers in our collocation facility and have you up and running quickly.
2: PLAN FOR THE WORST SCENARIO POSSIBLE
Downtime kills. The more we rely on IT systems and data to run our businesses, the more periods without access to those systems or data hurt. Our tolerance for downtime (often called recovery time objective, or RTO) has to drive our disaster recovery planning, even more than data loss and RPO. There have been solutions to the data loss problem for years, so these days, the true determining factor in beating a disaster is our ability to recover quickly, without any downtime. Offsite backup in geographically diverse locations is one piece of the downtime defense, but it alone cannot beat the beast. When considering a ssolution, you need one that makes it easy to turn your backups into production systems, whether through virtualization or some other means. Backups are only useful in recovery if you can a) access them even if your building is flooded and b) use them to run your business until you can restore your primary systems.
We implement image-based recovery with off-site replication in the event that your entire office and all of your data is destroyed. We can boot up the backup images of your servers in our collocation facility and have you up and running quickly.
3: CHOOSE YOUR OFFSITE STORAGE CAREFULLY
When the blackout hit San Diego in 2011, On-site Tech support and clients were up and functional still. That is because we put the right systems in place to keep the servers and network equipment up. We were able to remote into all of our clients and shut down their servers properly. Our management servers, etc. at our collocation facility remained up and un-affected the entire blackout.
4: MAKE SURE YOU CAN WORK FROM ANYWHERE
The whole point of your disaster recovery plan is keep your business running no matter what. If you can’t run your business from outside your office with little to no resources, maybe it’s worth considering why not and what you’d need to change to make it possible.
5: TEST AND REVISE (AND PRINT) YOUR PLAN REGULARLY
RESISTANCE IS NOT FUTILE
Disaster resistance is available and affordable for small to medium-sized businesses. A knowledgeable managed service provider can help with the necessary backup and restore software, as well as disaster recovery services. Continuity planning for the entire business, disaster recovery planning for IT assets, and regular updates of those plans will help protect small and medium businesses and minimize the effects of a disaster. Hardware failures and power outages are more likely to happen than natural disasters, and they can have devastating effects on small and medium businesses. Disaster resistance gives small business owners confidence that they can minimize downtime and eliminate data loss, no matter what happens. Then, in the face of disaster, they can avoid panic by following the plans that will help them recover as quickly as possible.