Whether from natural disasters or cyber attacks, disaster can wreak havoc on your business. In fact, 40-60% of small businesses that suffer from a disaster close permanently and 90% fail within a year.
This is why it’s so important to invest in disaster recovery services for small business DR services provide backups, recovery tools, and more that keep your company’s IT infrastructure protected.
Backups
Data backups are vital to every business, but they’re only one part of a full disaster recovery strategy. To ensure that your business can survive a catastrophic failure, you need to develop a full plan that includes both people and processes.
Your plans should include detailed documentation of how your employees will work together during a disaster, including passwords and usernames for all cloud and network accounts. You should also develop a list of all your suppliers and their contact information. This will allow your employees to continue working from home if necessary.
For example, you may need to create a recovery image for an entire server. Then, you can use that image to restore your system to an earlier point in time. This is called a recovery point objective (RPO). The higher the RPO, the less data you will lose in a disaster. To keep your RPO low, you should back up your data frequently.
Virtualization
With businesses becoming increasingly reliant on technology, a disaster recovery plan is critical to protect against unexpected hardware failures, natural disasters, and cyber-attacks. Virtualization can help with disaster recovery by making it easier to recover systems and applications.
Virtualization software allows businesses to take image-based backups of their system, which makes it easy to restore the system in case of a disaster. This reduces recovery time and improves business resilience by reducing downtime. It also makes it easier to test disaster recovery plans.
By using a managed IT service provider in Connecticut, businesses can implement an ideal disaster recovery plan with the help of virtualization. However, it’s important to keep in mind that while virtualization is an effective tool for disaster recovery, it may not be suitable for all companies. For example, it’s important to consider the cost and speed of implementation when choosing a virtualization solution.
Testing
When disaster strikes, the most important thing is that the business can recover quickly and minimize downtime. To do that, the business needs to have a plan in place. However, many small businesses don’t test their recovery plans.
Testing is essential to ensuring that your recovery plan is effective and can deliver the service continuity you need in an emergency. It also helps to identify any gaps in your protection system and allows you to fix them before a crisis occurs.
There are a variety of different types of tests you can do, including tabletop planning exercises and virtual simulations. However, you need to balance the scope of your tests with the availability of your resources. For example, if you’re working with a limited budget, you might want to focus on local disk or cloud spin up tests instead of more extensive cloud failover tests. This way, you can get more value out of your limited budget and minimize downtime in the event of a disaster.
Security
Whether from natural disasters like tornadoes, or man-made threats like cyber attacks, small businesses are constantly at risk. Having an effective disaster recovery plan in place can help minimize downtime and the impact of a crisis on the business, allowing them to keep serving customers, generating revenue and minimizing financial loss.
Businesses generate large amounts of data, with files continually changing throughout the day. This makes it critical for data to be backed up and protected. This can be done with a backup as a service solution, where hardware and software are hosted by a vendor and regularly updated.
It is also important to test and practice disaster recovery plans. This will help businesses to identify gaps in their plans and make necessary changes. Cultivate IT offers a variety of cloud-based solutions designed to protect small businesses from disaster and keep them up and running, no matter what happens. These services include backup and disaster recovery, virtual desktops, and data protection.
