What Actually Happens with a Disaster Recovery Incident?

Disaster recovery is one of those platforms that businesses don’t want to have to use, but need to spend ample time planning in case they do. This is rather unique in business, so only by truly understanding what you need to get out of your disaster recovery strategy can you create the comprehensive DR system that your business requires. 

In this article, we’ll take you through the data backup process as it relates to disaster recovery and what you need to know about it for it to be effective for your business. 

What Happens with Disaster Recovery?

The disaster recovery process aims to keep your organization’s operational continuity in place where if a situation occurs, and don't have a DR strategy in place, you might have a hard time getting back to business. There are several situations that could affect business continuity including natural disaster, power outage, hardware failure, or malware attacks. The immediate goal of DR is to minimize data loss and quickly restore a business’ ability to operate. 

Disaster recovery has two main variables: Data recovery and your DR strategy. Having a strong data backup system will be an important part of a successful DR platform, as having access to close-to-current operational data that you can restore quickly (whether it be from your normal hardware, new hardware, or cloud server) can mitigate the effects any disaster has on your business. 

At XFER, we offer what is called a data backup and disaster recovery service (BDR). This service identifies critical data, keeps it backed up both onsite and in the cloud, and makes recovery easier so your business can get back in action quickly. With a strong data backup program, your business can be restored to pre-disaster levels pretty quickly. 

The actual DR strategy has to consider a lot of situations depending on the disaster. If the COVID-19 pandemic taught us anything it is that no two disasters are created equal. The way you react to a flood of your brick and mortar location will be markedly different from how you would react to a power surge that fries a computer component. Both cause immediate downtime, but one may take longer to come back from and therefore have to have additional considerations. The core variables of any DR system are mostly procedural and are in place to ensure that the company is able to get operations back up and running before costs of sustained downtime get too high.

What Should Your Goals Be?

Simply put, when you are put in a situation where you risk losing data, you need to have a plan to restore your systems quickly. This demands that you prioritize actions that not only work toward that end, but keep the people that need to be in the know so that you don’t inadvertently exacerbate the problems. Your goals should be to create a disaster recovery plan that brings your systems back online as soon as possible and allows you to avoid large swaths of downtime. 

We can help you build a comprehensive disaster recovery strategy that not only protects your data from loss, but also allows for quick contingencies to be made with your business’ technology if the need should arise. Give our IT experts a call today at 734-927-6666 / 800-GET-XFER to have a conversation about building a successful disaster recovery platform.