Every Omaha and Lincoln business needs IT support, which can take many forms, from help desk services to IT security to strategic planning.
These days, significant events can take you completely offline, whether the event stems from weather, cyber attacks, or something as simple as internet interruption. You need a strong plan to anticipate, prevent, mitigate, and rapidly respond to such events.
Disaster recovery planning is crucial for business leaders, and learning the essentials of disaster recovery can help you think comprehensively about these issues and make appropriate preparations.
Disaster Recovery Saves Businesses
Disaster recovery planning keeps businesses alive in situations that could otherwise close their doors permanently.
According to the National Centers for Environmental Information, the state of Nebraska has seen more than 60 weather events that caused at least $1 billion in damage since 1980. That’s more than one per year, and it means that every business faces a consistent threat from natural disasters.
Perhaps more sobering is a statistic from Anvyl that found roughly 60 percent of small businesses across the US faced revenue losses from disruptions not in their area. Disasters in other regions caused business disruptions that cost businesses everywhere an average of 15 percent, just in 2022 alone.
Disasters can strike anywhere, and in a connected world, your business is exposed to risk — even when the threat feels far away.
The question, then, is this: how do you plan for a disaster and mitigate the fallout?
Four Critical Components of Disaster Recovery Planning
Regarding disaster recovery planning, most efforts easily fit into four categories: preparation, response, recovery, and evaluation.
Disaster Recovery planning is more than simply moving through a checklist. It requires a holistic look at how your technology operates within your organization and how the different elements of a disaster and response will impact, and then improve operations.
As you review each component of the plan, think about how the other sections fit into the concepts and strategies.
Preparation
Professional disaster recovery planning should include a minimum of the following:- Data backups
- Backup verification
- Infrastructure redundancies
- Safety protocols
- Backup communication methods
- Training
While not a comprehensive list, it highlights a few key concepts. Your preparation focuses primarily on anticipating the impacts of disasters and implementing preemptive solutions with your IT partners in Omaha. For example, computer hardware can fail due to flood or fire, so it’s essential you have multiple data backups, one onsite and two in the cloud in different parts of the country.
Do you use software (SaaS) or infrastructure (IaaS) in the cloud? You should consider those resources and how a disaster might impact them as well. Although a disaster may not strike your office, where is the resource or equipment running? And what are your vendors' backup plans to keep running? Find out this information and document it in your plan.
One way to approach your preparation is to list your potential disasters and assess each threat's likelihood and impact. Then, list out your midsize business’s specific vulnerabilities and critical functions.
With all this information in hand, your management team and IT partner can evaluate and prepare you for threats that are more likely to occur. It is worth investing in solutions that are critical to your business functions.
Preparation also includes IT and infrastructure audits to catalog all of your assets, including software, hardware, and infrastructure. These audits can highlight every point of risk within your organization, from employee-owned devices to in-house servers. These equipment audits can be obtained from your Lincoln IT provider.
Thorough audits also consider third-party access. Your vendors and providers fit into your assets and vulnerabilities and must be assessed.
Risk assessments and resource audits help you determine the critical resources needed to do business.
All of this factors into your response planning. Working with your team, you can implement preventative measures, mitigation strategies, and your detailed response plan.
Response
A strong response plan covers every action needed in the face of a disaster. Considering disasters can range from earthquakes to hurricanes, there’s a lot to consider.
As you plan for such disasters, remember a handful of key elements:
- Identifying risks
- Assessing safety concerns
- Evacuation and relocation (as needed)
- Redundant communication
- Securing locations
- Roles and responsibilities
- Recovery objectives
- Emergency management
- Informing stakeholders
Ultimately, your response plan will identify every role in a given disaster and the key actions that person will take. Clearly defining these responsibilities in the plan eliminates confusion when it comes time to execute the role and responsibilities. Most importantly, all roles and actions need to be practiced prior to any event.
Recovery
The recovery phase focuses on repairing damage, taking care of stakeholders, and restoring operations. At this stage, the nature of the problem is clear, and emergency protocols should be in action.
This is where you deploy your emergency response teams, as defined in the plan. It’s where you rely on redundancies, such as alternative locations, infrastructure in the cloud, and offsite data backups.
Damage assessments also facilitate recovery efforts. Disasters vary in scale, and some necessitate much more work than others to bring back operations. Others require minimal downtime before it’s back to business as usual.
In any case, the recovery plan identifies resources you can devote to fixing systems and restoring operations.
Evaluation
Evaluation does not occur after the other steps, chronologically. Instead, it’s an ongoing part of disaster recovery planning.
After an event, teams can evaluate what went wrong and how the response plan performed. Adjust the plan accordingly based on those findings.
Ideally, you don’t need an event for a response plan review. Instead, regularly scheduled rehearsals and reviews allow you to see the plan in action on your own terms.
Case Study
A case study involving Netflix shows how disaster recovery planning can successfully design around risks and mitigate damage.
In the 2010s, Netflix built its infrastructure on Amazon Web Services (AWS). A popular platform, AWS provided the infrastructure for most Netflix video streaming in the United States and several other countries.
AWS hit a major service outage, leaving Netflix without direct access in major markets. This represented downtime potential for millions of users, which would have proven cataclysmic.
In disaster recovery planning, Netflix assessed this risk and designed around it. Their systems were spread across multiple AWS server farms and regions, allowing them to keep operations running throughout the outage. While performance did suffer, users were still able to access content throughout the entire shortage.
It’s a perfect example of using disaster planning to adjust architecture in order to mitigate problems. The loss of any single server location was not enough to take Netflix completely offline in any region.
Looking at additional case studies, you will find that every major business suffers a disaster at some point, and how they recover depends primarily on their response and recovery planning.
Disaster Recovery Planning for Omaha Businesses
CoreTech provides disaster recovery planning along with comprehensive IT support for businesses of all sizes in Omaha and Lincoln. Contact us today to discuss planning and execution to ensure you have the IT support and data backup services you need.
Reach out to us today!
