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Disaster Recovery & Backups
Let’s do a mental exercise. Take a look at your
computer; think about all the information on it, the data and programs. Think
about how much time it took you to tweak your system to just the way you like
it. Now imagine walking into your office tomorrow morning to find your computer
has vanished without a trace! What do you do? Insurance! Right. You have
insurance. So, about a week later a brand new computer arrives at your office
with a fresh, clean hard drive. Now what? Now you wish you had a backup, don’t
you?
Backups are never really that important until you need them. After all it is
just preventative maintenance that is time-consuming, but if the mental exercise
has been a reality in your office, chances are you are taking a much more
serious approach to backups. If not, the question begs to be asked, “How
important is your data?” Or should it be “How important was your data”? And
before you answer that, remember that actions speak louder than words.
If you think the information you own is so important why wouldn’t you back
it up? There are a lot of reasons, but here are the five most used excuses:
Sound familiar? The overriding problem is that most
organizations have to have a major system problem (i.e., system crash, computer
theft, virus or malicious hacking) to realize the full benefit of backups. Then
it’s too late.
In a University of Texas study of organizations that lost data in a
disaster, 90% were out of business within 2 years; 50% never opened their doors
again.
Disheartening? Well it doesn’t have to be. With a proper evaluation from L.
Kianoff, your organization can protect yourself. The process is never ending and
it must be maintained – updated – and tested regularly to ensure that what
worked yesterday works today. This is commonly referred to as a Business
Continuity Plan and every organization needs one! Here is the basic process:
Analyze your organization’s risk. This is anything that could affect your
system including: viruses, accidental deletions, natural disasters, hackers and
theft. Rank each potential risk by degree of severity such as high, medium or
low ranking both probability and impact on your organization.
Establish a budget. Dollars spent in prevention are worth more than dollars
spent in recovery! From your risk analysis, you place a cost to the company for
a loss and a value for preventing the risk. And don’t forget downtime, which is
so often ignored because organizations rarely place a value on lack of
productivity because the system is down. The best way to value downtime is to
determine how long your organization can afford to be without its computer
system.
Develop the plan. Create a team of professionals responsible to specific
recovery of data or programming. Once again, you should analyze which program
and what data should be recovered first. The recovery plan should include time
to test the recovered system, which will ensure a clean restore before returning
the system to live status.
Test, test, test. This is the most important part of the plan. You have to
test frequently to ensure that your plan is still viable. Walk through a mock
restore with the team members performing their tasks to get a realistic picture
of the time needed to complete a restore.
Do you want to know if your system is safe and secure? For peace of mind
consider L. Kianoff’s Level 1 Security Review and Assessment.
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