Life is full of ups and downs. There are many unpredictable factors that businesses must face with adaptability, resilience and focus.
So when disaster strikes, having a reliable disaster recovery plan can mean the difference between preserving data and suffering system downtime.
As protecting data and technology becomes more critical, today’s businesses can no longer afford to wait until things go wrong to develop a plan for restoring their data centre infrastructure.
As the network infrastructure experts, Alliance SI understands the crucial importance of risk management and developing a robust recovery plan to ensure business continuity and minimise harmful operational risks.
We break down the top six ways to recover from a data centre disaster. By taking these proactive steps, you can face potential data centre disasters with a strategic and successful approach.
1. Assess risks
Before your business can start to look for any disaster recovery needs, it’s vital to determine what those specific needs are. For many businesses, data centre infrastructure develops organically as the business grows, so it’s easy to place potential risks and threats to operations as an afterthought.
But your data centre infrastructure should never stay as an unforgotten priority. A good first step is to implement risk management to identify the potential risks that a disaster might pose to your business.
Risk management is more than just disaster mitigation and recovery. It creates a comprehensive picture of all the ways a potential disaster could impact your operations and data centre infrastructure.
2. Develop your data centre disaster recovery plan
Once you have identified the risks, you can begin developing a data centre disaster recovery plan that lays out procedures and how to address them.
Your recovery plan should include a thorough assessment of data assets, detailed inventories, which systems should have priority in the event of a disaster and which services are impacted by compliance requirements.
3. Prepare your teams
It’s also a good idea to make sure that your recovery plan is readily available to IT personnel so that everyone knows what roles to fulfil and which tasks must be prioritised.
To help prepare your IT teams, implement regular emergency drills to evaluate response time and performance. This will also identify potential weaknesses in your disaster plan that need to be addressed.
4. Establish off-site backup locations
Backing up your data is one of the foundations of good disaster mitigation and data recovery. If data assets are stored in a single location, businesses open themselves up to a variety of risks including increased downtime, ransomware attacks and data loss.
As you’re choosing a location for your backup data, it’s a good idea to find a data centre that isn’t going to be exposed to the same risks as your primary data solution.
5. Create a plan to resume operations
Protecting your data and assets from a disaster is absolutely vital for disaster recovery. But businesses should always consider how they can continue to move forward and resume operations in the wake of a disaster.
An effective disaster recovery plan identifies which systems are prioritised when services are offline. This could mean moving back into locations that were disrupted by a disaster, the recovery of your data network or planning how to integrate new equipment to replace damaged infrastructure.
6. Regularly update and test your recovery plan
As businesses grow, new risk factors and threats will also develop. Once your data centre disaster recovery plan is in place, it’s important to understand that it won’t necessarily be viable five years down the track.
Changes in data availability needs or business growth are the primary reasons why your data centre recovery plan must be regularly updated.
As you’re assessing your recovery plan, you should also test your measures frequently as part of your ongoing disaster mitigation. After all, creating a solid plan won’t count for much in a crisis if no one understands how it’s supposed to work in practice.
Testing your recovery plan can also reveal gaps and potentially inaccurate assumptions that could compromise data availability or create barriers to getting systems back online. This is why ongoing testing is absolutely essential to any proactive approach to disaster recovery.
Put your data centre recovery plan in expert hands
Dealing with data centre disasters doesn’t need to be stressful. As we’ve established, developing an effective data centre disaster recovery plan is one of the most important steps any data centre will take. By taking the above factors into account, businesses can commit to maintaining high productivity and continuity.
Partnering with network infrastructure experts that can accommodate disaster recovery needs is a great way for businesses to focus on business growth rather than worrying about unknown risk factors.
At Alliance SI, we pride ourselves on our ability to see the bigger picture and deliver a seamless solution for our clients. We lay the foundation for secure, resilient and dependable communication networks.
Our large-scale infrastructure not only meets your immediate needs but will support your business growth in years to come. Our foresight and commitment to providing the best possible solutions are what keep our loyal customers coming back time and time again.
Contact us to learn more about how we can support your data centre needs with our innovative and scalable service offering.