As much as you can protect your IT infrastructure and the data you store on behalf of your company and your customers and clients there is always the possibility, no matter how small, that something could go wrong. That is why it is essential any business prepares for the possibility and invests in good back up and disaster recovery planning.

Employing the services of an IT support company to not only install and maintain your IT infrastructure but to create reliable back up and disaster recovery plans is a good way to defend against a breakdown.

The first step in disaster recovery planning is to create a priority list of what is important to keep the business running in conjunction with your IT support. That way they will know how you want things handled in the event of an emergency. This could be your email systems, your online payment systems, computer equipment or database recovery.

You will also need to consider how to inform your employees about the disaster, how to instruct them on what to do and how to handle your customers and reassure them that you can still provide the service they are used to.

Regularly reviewing your disaster recovery plan is a must, including the way in which you put preventative measures in place. How do you handle your back up, storage and data replication, is your hardware maintained as regularly as it needs to be, are your staff updated on policies and procedures? View your disaster recovery plans as a constantly evolving document, one that will need to be modified as your business changes and grows.

Think about regularly testing your policies and procedures. Your business IT support can set up a testing procedure and ensure that key performance indicators are met. This will help you to find any weak points in your plan and create solutions. If you don’t regularly test your disaster recovery then you could find it isn’t worth having at all if an emergency hits your IT infrastructure.

Obviously backing up your data is an essential part of any recovery plan, but many companies consider onsite back up enough. What if, though, the disaster hits and you have no way of accessing your onsite back ups? Now the benefits of offsite back up procedures become clear – too late.

Offsite (and onsite) back up should be carried out at least daily, but depending on the critical nature of the data in question a more regular back up should be considered. Try to determine how an acceptable time period for a loss and subsequent recovery of data and plan accordingly. If you need your database recovered within one hour – and the information cannot be more than an hour old – your back up procedure and disaster recovery plan should reflect that.

Of course, it’s not just hardware that can fail and cause an IT emergency. Companies can be the victim of both hacking and viruses and any plan needs to consider these. For the latter, a robust, regularly updated and regularly tested anti-virus installation should be enough to ensure you’re not infected via email or internet. Ensure your in-house IT team or outsourced IT support stays on top of this. Defending against being hacked, having your computer system broken into and your data put at risk, is more complicated but just as important.

Here you need to consider file security, encryption and intrusion detection. An outsourced IT company is best placed to advise and implement these preventative measures.

By planning for the worst you will often avoid it all together, so don’t consider it an unnecessary expense – it could save you a fortune in the long run.

Author Bio: Ian Grainger is wrtiing on behalf of Efuse, a specialist IT support company in Manchester, UK.

Category: Computers and Technology
Keywords: it support, it solutions, disaster recovery, data back up