backup

For many non-profit organizations and businesses the upcoming holiday season is the busiest time of the year. A technology failure – of any kind, during your busiest season could make or break all the planning you have put in place.

Of course you want to minimize the possibility of that even occurring, but you also want to plan to recover as quickly as possible if it does occur.

 

A one day outage with no access to your customer data in your busiest season?

That will have a huge impact on the success of the season.

Be ready to restore

Here’s some questions for your IT Support department:

  • CAN you restore? I mean have they tried? Has anyone actually tested a restore from your backup systems – lately? if not this needs to be a priority item for preparedness.
  • Do they know how to get that restored data back where it needs to be so that you can continue? Whether it’s a Word file or your customer database, you don’t want to be learning this in the midst of an outage.
  • How long will a restore take? Determine what your critical systems are and find out how long it will take to get each of them back on line. Then look for ways to shorten that time.

Plan for coverage

If your IT Support is outsourced you will want to determine response times and ensure someone will be available during your busy periods to get you back up and going as quickly as possible.

Plan to fail

Yes, it sounds contrary to how you want to think, and yes it’s a depressing thought. Here’s a better way to put it:

“Expect the best – prepare for the worst”

Don’t just assume everything will go as planned.

  • Have a copy of your cloud backup also stored locally so that you can recover as quickly as possible.
  • If you back up individual computers then be prepared if one fails. Have some spare computers available that can be swapped in and data recovered to them.
  • Make sure you also have backups of your critical infrastructure, such as configuration and system images of routers, firewalls, servers, etc.

Start now

There’s a bit of research and testing to be done here, so start now. It may take some time to test a restore and figure out the best process for putting things back the way they were. This is time well spent though, and will be significantly cheaper than trying to figure all this out during a crisis.

Call a meeting or make a phone call, get the answers you need.

You can thank us later.

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