There’s no telling when a crisis will strike which is why it is imperative to setup fail safes enabling you to keep your business running in any situation.
Having backup plans for every technical component that your staff and even customers rely on is key. Your company’s telecommunications systems are typically one of your top investments—here’s what you should know about protecting it with a disaster recovery plan.
Centralization and Redundancy
Relying on your service provider in this instance may be an option. Generally, larger organizations have considered the odds of experiencing a natural disaster that would wipe out their data centers and have their own disaster recovery plan. In this case, your services problem will more than likely have a backup plan in place and on the ready.
Creating centralization and redundancy simply means that beyond the primary places from which you access your applications you must also have a central location that provides access to the same information. Having an alternative location which houses your data enables you to access it in the event that your primary center goes down.
Which Components Must Remain Available
Not all programs and applications are absolutely necessary to keep your business running while you’re having an outage. It’s important to separate the mission critical pieces from those that could be made less of a priority. Any technology having to do with the following should take top priority:
- Customer facing applications
- Communications services for customers
- Telecommunications systems
- Financial systems
Reliable Remote Coverage and Support
Make sure that your service provider supplies remote coverage and support. If you have an outage at 3am you should expect your provider to be there and ready to assist you. You should also expect that once the initial person you worked with is off the clock that they’ve got someone else to pick up the baton and run with it. Outages don’t just affect your organization during business hours! Take for instance, companies that run e-commerce sites or service clients from around the globe. They want their issues solved immediately.
Don’t rush into your disaster recovery plan. It happens quite often that a business realizes they’re not prepared for a catastrophic event and scramble to get one in place. Take your time mapping your strategy, assign responsibility to teammates accordingly and adjust your approach as your planning continues. Need help with a disaster recovery plan for your office—contact us for more information.
