Usually businesses have some sort of plan in mind if there were to be a natural or man-made disaster that affected there IT operations. But often that plan isn’t fully formulated and rarely is it tested under realistic failure simulations. If your IT operations are as critical to your business as they are to most, and you want to keep running or get running as soon as possible after a disaster, you need a full disaster preparedness plan along with periodic testing of that plan.
The five elements of disaster recovery:
Backups
At the core of any recovery strategy is keeping adequate backups AND testing those backups by restoring them. If you don’t have extra hardware to restore to, this is where the cloud can help. CloudFast Migration services let you restore most backup formats to a public cloud like those from Amazon, Microsoft and Google. You can then test that your backup works by temporarily renting a machine in the cloud. This is a very cost effective way to test backups!
Equipment
If your key assets are affected by water or fire or other damage what is the plan to replace them? If there are backups for systems that were destroyed, who will deploy those backups, and to what hardware? Has any of this been tested? Here again a cloud based approach can help. If you services, like email and filesystems are in the cloud, and not in your office, not only do you get reliable cost effective service, but you also will keep running in most disaster situations.While this won’t help for laptops, solutions like Amazon Workspaces can. Each user can maintain their desktop in the cloud and connect from virtually any device to their personal desktop , always running always with their files. If disaster strikes, and their device is damaged, all they need to do is get a new device. CloudFast can help get you going with services, servers and desktops in the
People
At the end of the day what is going to make you most resilient in a crisis is your team, the people you work with. You should have a plan of how people will coordinate, where they will meet, who will make decisions if a leader is not available. And again it is best to test this in a simulation or through other mechanisms. At CloudFast we bet you have hired a great team, let us guide you through creating a plan for what will happen after a disaster!
Check back for more blog entries, we have some great topics coming to help you make sense of the cloud!
