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Preparing For The Worst: Have You Thought Seriously About IT Disaster Recovery?

By Francis West on 6th June 2014

Here at Westtek we spend a lot of our time making sure that our clients’ IT systems are working smoothly and efficiently. At some point, however, it is important to think about what could go wrong with your IT systems.  In the end, it is thinking about potential problems that enables you to plan both to avoid them and to deal with them should the worst happen.

Therefore, consider this really important question: Have you thought seriously about IT disaster recovery?

Here is some advice on how to start to address this important topic.

Assess The Risks Of An IT Disaster

The best place to start when you first think about IT disaster recovery is to ask what could go wrong.  When you work with us, we will talk to you about your vulnerabilities. We will look at the range of things that could go wrong with your IT systems. 

Our solution to many of the problems that we uncover is a simple one.  We encourage you not to have all your eggs in one basket. 

  • Don’t rely exclusively on the servers in your building to store your data.
  • Don’t rely exclusively on cloud computing solutions either.

We advise our clients to use cloud-based storage and to use their local servers, too. That way, if you lose one copy of your valuable data, you still have another one stored at a different location. Of course, you will need a robust backup regime, too, but we can help with that.

Establish Recovery Targets

If something goes wrong with your server or with your access to your cloud-based storage system, if your information somehow gets corrupted or damaged, once you realise you have a problem, the first thing you will want to know is how long you will have to wait to get your IT systems working again. 

If you have a lot of data, numerous locations and tens of users waiting to get on with their work, you will know that recovery time matters.  The longer your staff are unable to work, the more costly the disaster.  In some cases, the IT disaster itself is relatively trivial. It is the recovery process – and especially the time it takes – that really costs your business money.

IT recovery did, in the past, take a long time. When data had to be recovered from backup tapes, recovery could take many hours or even days. 

We aim to help you to recover from an IT disaster in two hours.  When you work with us we will restore your business’s access to your valuable data speedily because we back-up your data regularly.  We also use modern cloud-based technology to manage the recovery process. 

Is An IT Disaster Imminent?

There’s one thing you can be sure of.  Sooner or later you will have an IT disaster.  Someone who has access to your data, either by accident or design, will do something that places your data, and your IT systems, in jeopardy.  At some point, a natural disaster will strike.  Bad weather, a problem in an adjacent office, a freak accident can all affect your business. You cannot avoid such disasters, but you can work out how you will recover from them.

When you start to work with Westtek, we will talk to you about business continuity and IT disaster recovery.  It is worth your while to allocate time to thinking about these problems.  Just hoping the disaster will never happen – or at least that it won’t happen today – isn’t a good  business continuity strategy.   

 

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