Disasters – natural and manmade – are inevitable. The damage they cause is not.
Your connected company’s resilience to these events depends on two things:
1. How prepared you are for system downtime or data loss.
2. How quickly and effectively can you restore access to systems and data.
Cloud-based IT and business continuity solutions delivered by a managed service provider (MSP) like Cox Business can help your business with both.
Leverage Cloud Solutions for Continuity
You might already use cloud-based applications to support work from anywhere. If so, you’ve got the workings for a great business continuity strategy. Cloud solutions also can empower your disaster recovery and data protection strategies. Core components include:
- Connectivity – Since your cloud apps rely on connectivity, consider implementing a redundant internet access solution like SD-WAN with auto-failover. The secondary path can keep your business up and running when your primary connection fails.
- Backup as a Service (BaaS) – Automatically back up your data to the cloud with retention times and restore points that work for your company. No missed backups and no burdens on your IT teams, no matter what else is happening in the moment.
- Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) – Backing up your systems and applications to virtualized infrastructure in the cloud to meet your recovery time and recovery point objectives (RTOs and RPOs) ensures that you can restore operations quickly and efficiently when needed.
Develop a Disaster Response Plan
Cloud solutions form a solid foundation for business continuity, but they’re not deployed or accessed in a vacuum. Process is critical to effectively responding to business-interrupting events, so planning is essential to executing disaster recovery operations. Planning steps, which your MSP can help you facilitate, should include:
- Calculating ROI – The first step in developing a response plan is measuring the business impact of downtime. What would downtime cost you in lost revenue? Decreased productivity? Customer experience or liability? Brand reputation? Your BaaS or DRaaS provider can help you answer these questions and use that data to conduct a cost/benefit analysis to arrive at your optimal RTO and RPO.
- Defining and Documenting Your Plan – Documenting your plan with defined objectives, roles, and responsibilities is crucial to successful disaster response. Don’t expect clear heads during times of crisis. Make your plan thorough but easy to follow. TIP: Don’t store copies of your response plan in outage-sensitive systems. Make copies in multiple formats for assured accessibility.
- Testing and Validating Your Plan – Test your plan regularly. Low-traffic and maintenance windows provide ad-hoc opportunities for periodic failover and backup testing. Data integrity, network connectivity, and cross-location integration need regular evaluation. Planned recovery drills ensure your plan stays current and relevant and your recovery team is ready to take action when needed.
Get Expert Advice & Execution
IT disaster preparedness in the cloud era involves a combination of solutions and processes. Minimize downtime and ease the journey with support from a reliable, experienced MSP like Cox Business. We can help you:
- Calculate downtime costs
- Determine optimal RTO/RPO
- Tailor backup and disaster recovery solutions based on specific business requirements
- Conduct regular tests
- Ensure seamless transitions and minimal impact during a disaster
