The Importance of a Backup and Disaster Recovery Plan

Imagine what would happen if you suddenly lost the key data, records and documents your business needs to function day-to-day. Today, services like the cloud and Managed IT have made technology much more reliable, but outages and other disasters still happen, and they can wreak havoc on your business if you don’t have a plan!

The Danger of Technology Failure

How much business would you lose for every hour or worse – every day – you were down? What impact would this have on your business? This is a key concern when designing a backup and disaster recovery plan. The first step is to identify and prioritize your data:

• Recovery Point Objective (RPO) – What data do you need to restore quickly in order to continue or resume business? While you don’t want to lose anything, older archival records may not be crucial to operations.
• Recovery Time Objective (RTO) – How quickly do you need to regain access? One day? One hour? Less?

Protecting Paper Records

A recent IDC study found that 58% of businesses still rely on paper records. The problem with paper is that it is inherently difficult to backup, making the most heavily reliant paper processes the ones that would be most disrupted by any loss. Events like water damage, fire, theft or misfiling can render your hard copies unsalvageable.

To be effective, your recovery plan must address the paper issue. Fortunately, technology has made it much easier to convert paper records into digital documents.

Don’t Forget the Non-Technical Side

Along with your technical plans, you should also consider the non-technical side:

• Do you have a list of key numbers and email addresses offsite?
• Do you have a notification procedure in place for customers and partners when an incident directly impacts them?
• Have your employees been trained on what to do in the event of a problem?

Today, backup and disaster recovery planning is crucial and should be a part of your document management program. Data loss and outages happen! Let us help you design a disaster recovery plan for your business. Give us a call today!