Be Prepared! Designing a Disaster Recovery Plan

Many a successful, rapid growth business is spawned from a work laptop, the documents slowing cluttering up with ideas and spreadsheets popping up. The first investment in a business is usually the purchasing of a quality work computer, even before the entrepreneur cuts loose to dedicate all their time to building their empire. It’s also unfortunately common that the first disaster for a business is a computer crash, and if you haven’t been strategic in your data storage you can lose everything, from customer details to invoices and MYOB data. It is absolutely critical you develop a computer disaster recovery plan early in your business’s life, even before you hire a regular IT support person and regularly revisit and update your plan. We’ve put together some guidelines that will help you assemble your plan.

There are three key stages to consider in a discovery recovery plan. Preparing and trying to avert a computer disaster, during the disaster and after the disaster.

Preparing and averting a computer disaster:

Design a disaster plan: It sounds simple, but it will help minimise data loss, not to mention panic, stress and anger if one occurs. Developing a disaster recovery plan is also a key way to communicate that a strategic and careful planning supports your vision. This thorough attitude will filter through to your other staff members, and inspire careful saving of data.

Develop a data recovery checklist: work out what could go wrong, how to avoid the issues and then work out the goals of what you’d need to recover.
Invest in quality software, that is ideally hosted offsite: Many Australian website infrastructures and data storage systems are hosted by the creator/host company, who have multiple, sophisticated servers and extensive disaster recovery plans.

Virtualise your server: Run multiple servers on the one machine, and constantly upgrade, overhaul and cool the computers to avoid the classic, foreseeable issues that lead to computer crashses. Make sure that you use two physical servers/computers, and constantly save, back up and minimize disruptions when you are working.

During the disaster:
Maintain leadership: Keep your team calm, and don’t go hitting extra buttons or panicking. It is best if you take a moment to calm down, and then activate your disaster recovery plan. This may well include contacting your clients or customers to let them know that their projects/products may be delayed slightly, but that you’re working to keep to schedule. Expect to be on your mobile a lot in this period, to your staff, computer support and clients to achieve the goal of getting the business back up and running.

Hire experts: If you find that your preventative measures including offsite backup and paper copies have not achieved the complete data protection plan you hoped, hire an expert to relocate you data is possible, and definitely to prepare your system for offiste data back up.

After the disaster:
Learn from it and rebuild: If you have lost some data, you will need to locate the any financial information again. You can search your email archive, or request it directly from the client. You will need to explain what has occurred, and let them know the steps you’ve taken to prevent these issues ever happening again by using offsite data backup.

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