A business owner runs through the street as buildings burn around him. He clutches his business’ server in his hands as he runs, searching for safety.
Sounds like the opening to an end-of-the-world movie, right? Unfortunately, this happened last year to a large medical center with numerous locations around California during the Santa Barbara fires. Because he didn’t have a disaster recovery plan in place, this business manager did the only thing he could think of to protect his data – unplug his server, grab it and run.
Prepare Your Business for Disaster
Wildfires aren’t the only threat. From earthquakes to cybercrime, California businesses face the constant possibility of disaster. Even planned brownouts can endanger your business.
Power outages are frequent occurrences in central California, especially during hot summer months when everyone has their AC cranked. These planned brownouts create a situation that has to be dealt with immediately – and correctly.
Recently, we were teaching a Microsoft Exchange class off site when the power went out in the middle of the day. While all computers, printers and servers were still running, the maintenance team kicked on the generator. Unfortunately, this surge of power shut down every one of the organization’s power supplies and servers, making matters worse. With a proper IT incident response plan in place, the managers would have known there’s a proper order of shutting down their IT assets and then bringing everything back up after the generator has been turned on and stabilized the power supply.
Not only is this the season for brownouts, earthquakes and wildfires, Microsoft Server 2008 also is reaching end-of-life in January, so server decisions will have to be made soon, making this the perfect time to evaluate moving your computing and data backups to the cloud.
Any day, you may have to respond to a disaster and not having an IT disaster recovery plan in place could cost you customers, employees and even your business entirely.
Safeguard Your Data from Tragedy
If you are not securing your sensitive information in the cloud or with a very resilient offsite backup program, your business is not ready for the plethora of disasters that California businesses encounter.
Don’t trust consumer-grade apps with your business’ data
To really protect your business you need to use professional backup solutions instead of consumer-grade, storage-only apps like OneDrive, Google Drive or Mozy. These apps are designed to back up family photos and recipes, not corporate data.
Add resiliency with the Cloud
When your business uses cloud-based apps and storage, recovering after a disaster is much faster than trying to access offsite and on-premise backups (which may not even be available unless you’re a quick thinker that grabs your servers and runs for safety).
Know the difference between staying operational and powering down
Your uninterruptible power supply (UPS) is designed to give you enough time to power down your systems safely; not to keep your operations up and running. Cloud computing, on the other hand, is designed to keep you up and running 24/7. Even accessing offsite backups takes more time than most businesses want to be down, so it’s important to consider how you make your data usable again once you’ve gotten through any incident.
An IT Disaster Recovery Plan Prepares You for the Inevitable
If you’re not sure how your business would respond to disaster, you’ll want to have a security assessment conducted to determine current gaps and how to close them. Then, you can put together an IT disaster recovery plan to answer questions like, Who is responsible for calling the electric company or notifying customers?
DiamondIT’s security experts can help you create an IT disaster recovery plan to protect your technology assets, initiate and execute the plan during a disaster and reconnect and restore connectivity once the disaster has passed.
Unless you are 100% sure you can restore and reconnect your IT systems amidst the chaos of a disaster, give us a call to determine your disaster readiness and prepare for the inevitable. Do it now; not when fires are burning around you or you’re two feet under water. You can reach us at (877) 716-8324 or online.