[BreachExchange] Dust Off Your Business-Continuity Plan

[Inga Goddijn]

http://www.datacenterjournal.com/dust-off-business-continuity-plan/

Disaster-recovery solutions are now a fundamental part of staying in
business. Especially for small to midsize businesses, having a solid and
reliable copy of data is essential. But simple storage solutions aren’t the
only consideration when it comes to continuing operations after a major
disaster.

In a situation where data is threatened—be it a weather anomaly, ransomware
attack or extensive power outage—the smaller the organization, the more
likely it will experience a catastrophic failure unless it has a reliable
and fast failover solution. Your organization may already have a
business-continuity plan or storage solution for short or small outages,
but are you prepared for a disaster? Here are a few things to think about
when reviewing your data-recovery plan.
Map Your Disaster-Recovery Plan to Your Business Objectives

A retail business relies heavily on consistent income, but that income may
fluctuate depending on the time of year. If a severe storm were to knock
out power during the holiday season, a shop’s point-of-sale data must be
quick and easy to recover to stay in business. On the other hand, a small
outage in mid-February may affect sales to a much lesser degree. Are your
organization’s data needs dependent on the time of year?

According to the U.S. Small Business Administration, about 25 percent of
small businesses are unable to reopen after a major outage. Ask yourself
these questions about your business-continuity objectives:

   - Could you bounce back after an outage of hours, days, or weeks?
   - Are your operations safe in your on-premises location, or should you
   consider a cloud backup solution as well?

A 2015 Gartner study found that 40 percent of organizations rated their
ability to recovery from disaster as “fair” or “poor” and that the cost of
just one hour of downtime ranges from $8,000 for a small business to
$700,000 for an enterprise. This one-time financial threat is troubling but
doesn’t even consider the loss of reputation, negative PR and impaired
customer revenue that an outage might cause.

If your data isn’t easy to restore, will your business survive any amount
of downtime?
Have a Data-Backup Plan—and a Data Recovery Plan, Too!

Data storage is one thing, but easily retrieving and restarting operations
is another. Combining cloud storage with a backup and replication plan
allows organizations to quickly and confidently restore data swiftly and
flexibly. Cloud storage reduces the risk of losing critical data by
enabling users to securely keep data and recovery solutions off site.

Disaster-recovery managed-service providers
<http://www.pcm.com/services/managed-services> (MSPs) can help determine
how quickly you can restore your organization’s data and applications after
an outage. An on-premises data-storage solution can be wiped out in an
instant, but a cloud solution guarantees your data and applications are
quickly retrievable. Patrick Lohmeyer, Associate Vice President of PCM’s
Service Offerings, asks, “Which applications and data are critical to your
business operations, and which aren’t?” Depending on the MSP, recovery
times can vary from a few minutes to a few days, but that’s still better
than losing data completely.
Weigh the Price of Disaster Versus the Cost of Recovery

The cost of data backup varies depending on whether a partial restoration,
full restoration or total blackout restoration is necessary. What’s the
biggest threat facing your organization?

A disaster-recovery MSP will offer many types of solutions. The simplest
service is one where a customer replicates on-premises data and saves a
copy. Historically, doing so meant saving a copy on tape and storing it in
a warehouse. But with modern cloud backup, storage is now cheaper, it’s
easier to access, and it saves time and effort in IT infrastructure and
recovery. Searching for old tapes is inefficient. Locating your data on the
cloud can take mere minutes. More-extensive solutions from an MSP will
often include faster data recovery, software retrieval or entirely off-site
business-continuity plans.

After Hurricane Sandy devastated the East Coast in 2012, only 70 percent of
businesses completely restored their activities within six months. If your
organization is destroyed by a natural disaster such as an earthquake or
hurricane, can your employees work remotely and keep business humming? If
not, a full recovery solution for data and applications may be necessary.
Which assets does your organization require to weather that type of storm?
Contact a Managed-Service Provider Today

A disaster-recovery MSP can help implement these much needed
business-continuity solutions. Lohmeyer says, “Historically, companies ran
multiple private data centers in an effort to spread the risk and provide
redundancies themselves, as opposed to using a hosting and/or cloud
partner. As companies shift IT functions to service partners in order to
focus their efforts on their own products and services, they are less
interested in continuing to bear the costs of multiple data centers and
managing it themselves.”

A good disaster-recovery cloud solution should offer cost-effective plans
for data recovery in any scenario, from partial to full restoration, and
from small to large storage as well as automation requirements. When
considering the expense of a disaster, make sure your MSP has your best
interests at heart. It should readily provide information about its
reporting procedures, IT-downtime strategy, recovery-time objectives and
other solutions you’ll need in a disaster.

Don’t leave your organization in the dark. Dust off your backup plan and
consider how your organization might survive a disaster. Don’t have a plan?
Time to get serious about staying in business.
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