Understanding - Planning, Preparedness & Recovery
Downtime refers to the time when critical systems become unavailable or inoperable resulting in an outage for a group of users or entire organizations. Downtime of any kind can have a significant impact on the revenue and reputation of a managed service provider.
Many companies attempt to estimate the financial impact of downtime events. Without a solid disaster recovery plan, these estimates barely scratch the surface of the ac
Recovering from a significant downtime event can require your organization to utilize outside professionals to perform data recovery, pay overtime rates to employees putting in extra time to resolve outage issues, or ultimately losing clients who may be frustrated with service interruptions.
We here at ProVal have a few helpful tips to help you minimize downtime and prevent unplanned outages:
Develop a Disaster Recovery Plan
A successful disaster recovery plan requires documenting the step by step approach your organization takes to ensure recovery of critical systems and data in any unforeseen circumstance. One key aspect to remember while creating your disaster recovery plan is to keep in mind the desired RTO’s [Recovery Time Objective] and RPO’s [Recovery Point Objective].
Preparation and Readiness
While having a plan in place is a great place to start, without Disaster Recovery Testing Procedures in place, you may find yourself in a tough situation if a step in your process was not captured or documented incorrectly when attempting to recover. The results from the testing process would help to define your timely responsiveness and ETA’s when you actually need to perform a recovery. By regularly assessing your recovery testing results allow you to fine-tune your process and set accurate expectations.
The Art of Recovery
With the help of your disaster recovery plan and results from your recovery testing, you are in a great shape to respond to emergencies and successfully perform efficient recoveries. By routinely reviewing and practicing these processes help to ensure that you and your client organizations can maintain and recover critical operations after a disaster.
We hope that with these Disaster Recovery Practices, you will feel more confident in your organization's readiness to respond to a critical situation either within your own organization or in support of your client's.
Stay tuned for future blog articles where we dive into implementing these practices on widely used backup solutions such as, “Veeam”, “Datto” and “StorageCraft”.