One topic our customers often consult us on is disaster recovery/business continuance. These are actually similar, yet distinct, subjects. From a high level, one deals with the IT function of rapidly restoring systems to serve the needs of the business. The other deals with the business continuing to operate after a loss of computing resources (while awaiting their restoration by the IT team).
The most critical part of any disaster recovery plan is the maintenance of backups. The IT team is responsible for backups of critical system data, and protecting these backups via offsite storage and meticulous organization. In many instances, especially in smaller organizations, backups are often overlooked or inadequate, for reasons of cost or bandwidth. Even if you have a great backup process, it must coexist with a broader disaster recovery / business continuity plan. The IT team may be able to bring up hardware and networking at a colocation facility, or restore systems in the on-premise data center, but the business managers must have procedures in place to access these resources, provide physical workspaces and communications infrastructure. (The image above shows the table of contents from TOPAZ own internal Business Continuity SOP).
Businesses are continuously at risk from hackers, hardware failure, and software issues. Being prepared with policies, procedures and good backups can make the difference between continuing to operate, and going out of business. TOPAZ offers services such as colocation hosting and disaster recovery plans that can address some of these issues, and help give you a reliable and robust route forward if disaster strikes.
