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Even the most complex hosting configurations today are vulnerable to the physical realities of our world – hard drives can fail, fiber optic cables can be cut, and natural disasters don’t heed even the most inclusive security policies. So what can today’s online businesses do to prepare for the worst? Here are 6 steps to help you maintain business continuity through unexpected events or disasters.
1. Create a disaster recovery plan.
Creating a disaster recovery plan can be an incredibly intimidating task to approach, with an unlimited number of unknown scenarios that could possibly surface. A good place to start is with the essentials, by identifying what services are mission critical to your business. Web presence, email and application database access are likely, but these will vary between organizations. Once key services have been identified, consider a course of action to be taken if these services were rendered unavailable for whatever reason.
Another factor to consider is the desired Recovery Time Objective (TRO). This is the amount of time that is acceptable between a disaster occurring and the business being back up and running.
2. Implement and test your plan. Then test it again.
A good disaster recovery plan is only useful if it is deployed properly and tested regularly. Businesses choosing to take a set it and forget it approach to disaster recovery may end up paying the price five years down the road when an unexpected catastrophe occurs, and your key systems have changed but the policy has not been updated to reflect the changes. System updates, lost passwords, staffing changes, office relocation, infrastructure upgrades and disorganized backup tapes are just a few examples of everyday changes that can render even the best disaster response plan out of date.
Testing of the disaster recovery plan should be carried out at regular, ongoing intervals. Catastrophic events can be simulated during off-peak hours, giving your IT staff a chance to test failover systems without the added pressure of an actual emergency. This provides an opportunity to correct oversight in the policy before a critical incident has a chance to significantly disrupt your business.
3. Use offsite data backups.
Local data backups are better than no backups, but essentially useless in the event of a natural disaster that devastates your localized infrastructure. Many organizations utilize tape backup libraries, but to efficiently protect your data these tapes must be tested regularly, managed properly and stored in a secure, offsite location. Restoring data from these tapes can often be very time consuming and confusing if the backup rotation isn’t well-managed.
In recent years, many businesses have turned to highly redundant Storage Area Networks (SAN) or simple-to-use cloud storage. A product like IBM Tivoli backup service simplifies and speeds up the restoration process significantly, by allowing you to easily back up and replicate your data between multiple datacenters.
Regardless of the backup strategy you chose, one of the most integral parts of having a functional disaster recovery plan is to regularly restore data from your backups to ensure they are functioning properly, and that your support staff prepared to restore data when disaster strikes.
4. Take advantage of redundancy.
Mission critical services should always have redundant failovers, preferably in geographically diverse locations. The goal of redundancy is to eliminate any single point of failure within your organization. For example, imagine you have two servers – an email server and a web server. Both are hosted in the same location, and one day an event occurs which renders both of these servers unavailable. The data on these servers is backed up daily, but you realize that the information needed to restore this data is stored on the now inaccessible web server, and you can’t communicate to others within your organization because your email is down. In this example, these servers are your single point of failure, so steps should be taken to ensure the services provided by these servers is redundantly available in case of disaster.
5. Be transparent, communicate often.
In the event of a disaster, there is a possibility that regular lines of communication can become unavailable, so it is important to define alternative methods of communication before a disaster happens. Contact information for key staff members should always be kept up-to-date and made redundantly available. Depending on the structure within your organization, a disaster response person or team should be appointed, and a process defined for both internal and external communication. Your staff and your customer base need to be kept in the loop during a crisis, so how will you get information to them? In recent years, savvy businesses have turned to forums or third-party social media sites like Twitter as a means for communicating up-to-the-minute status information.
6. Outsource to a professional managed hosting provider.
Maintaining your IT infrastructure is a lot of work, and a comprehensive disaster recovery plan is just one part of the picture. Choosing to use a managed hosting provider is a great option for businesses who prefer to focus on running their business rather than stressing about IT infrastructure. A typical managed hosting provider delivers redundant power and cooling systems, has a strong technical support staff available round-the-clock, multiple datacenters, and a reliable network backbone.
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