Most common mistakes to avoid in disaster recovery

Having a backup on the cloud truly becomes worth it when you have to recover data. Often, disasters such as a fire breaking out in the server room take down everything in the room. You never want to be vulnerable to disasters. There might be a power failure, a storm that disrupts communication, and much more. Data recovery is helpful; however, there are  mistakes people make all the time. These mistakes can be fixed, but they may also result in you never being able to recover your data. Here are the mistakes you need to avoid.

Not having a continuity plan

Business continuity is essential if you take part in the global world of business. No matter what happens at your end, you need to ensure that your services keep running and keep providing your clients with what they need. Many companies do not have a continuity plan. They have no trainings and no written material about maintaining business continuity, which leads to chaos when a disruption occurs. Everyone in your company should know what to do in case of an emergency. Write down a continuity plan which tells your employees what they need to do if the website or communication methods of the website/product are not working.  Making the continuity plan may seem too cumbersome at first, but it will result in your data being saved.

Backing up everything

You also need to understand what needs to be backed up if you want the recovery to go smoothly. Do not back everything you have – it is tempting and not too expensive, but you need to look at what exactly you recover. If you back up everything, the time it takes to recover them will be considerable. If the data is for archival purposes it does not require instant recovery Choosing what needs to be backed up also has many other advantages. You will end up paying a lot lesser for your services because you’ll be using fewer backup services. You should backup everything if you can, but you need to determine what needs to be instantly recoverable and what can be archived. For backup solutions, you can have a look at top backup products favored by IT pro’s.

Forgetting about the people in the equation

When it comes to technology, specs matter a lot. You need to know the numbers behind how your recovery will perform. You will know how much data is backed up and what your connection speed is. A mistake many companies make is that they forget about the people – no matter how advanced and complex your system is, it will still be handled by your employees. Messing up with data recover can result in a permanent loss of data if the person tinkering around isn’t familiar with the system. Leave this work to the trained professionals only. You also don’t know who will be in the office when the disaster recovery needs to take place. Your data recovery setup should be as foolproof as possible and you should train as many people as possible on using it.

Not using international backups

When you use a technology like AWS or Azure, you have the option to choose the geographic area where your data will be stored. Pick a place that is unlikely to be affected by the climate and weather conditions in your area in order to minimize the risk of data recovery not being available. Most good MSPs will have a lot of redundant copies of your data. Try to distribute these copies in as many different geographic regions as possible in order to minimize the risk.

Data recovery should be a part of your infrastructure’s design

This is the biggest mistake companies make – they think of data recovery after they have the whole system designed. Data loss can be a fatal mistake for companies – a company cannot operate unless it has the data of its customers. You need to ensure that the person who knows the most about disaster recovery is present at the table where the system is being designed and set up.

If you figure out what you need to do to keep your data safe and recoverable within the design of your basic infrastructure, you increase the chances of successful and quick data recovery. You do not want to end up with a system that does not play nice with your disaster recovery requirements. Good MSPs will always outline the importance of disaster recovery and ensure that data backup is a core part of your infrastructure. You shouldn’t accept anything less.

Conclusion

Data recovery is an essential part of any MSP structure, as such, make sure that you avoid the most common mistakes that usually happen: work with a plan, always have a backup, used trained personnel and train them properly, and as strange as it might sound, the geographical positioning of your backup is essential for data recovery.