On October 29, 2012, Hurricane Sandy swept off many offices and homes in the eastern coast of the United States. The disaster caused severe damage to New Jersey coastline and New York City. According to Fortune Magazine, out of 500 U.S. corporations with the maximum revenues in 2010, 45 of them had their headquarters in New York City and 12 in New York State. Many of these offices, including managed service providers (MSPs), collapsed after Hurricane Sandy and suffered a massive loss of business resources.
Even though most of these companies had a disaster recovery plan, none of them allocated it correctly. Some of them had not made enough investment in data recovery whereas some of them did not have a data recovery method. Those companies spent on disaster recovery as a service, but they did not choose the right disaster recovery service provider.
The failure reveals that their disaster recovery service providers did not have expertise in protecting technology infrastructure, providing security consultation, and giving continuity solutions. There are some lessons enumerated from customers’ experiences that disaster recovery service providers must learn to provide a more instinctive disaster recovery solution to enterprises. Some of the lessons are the following.
IMAGE: PIXABAY
Choose The Right Disaster Recovery Method For Your Client
The traditional tape-based recovery method restores needs installation of new servers to restore the data in the potential environment. It is a time-consuming process and needs both hardware and software experts in installation. No organization can afford time and workforce during a disaster.
Therefore, service providers should insist that businesses use the image-based backup to store their client’s data. It duplicates the operating system as well as associated data and stores them in a single file named image. Image-based recovery products create online backups and are compatible with indistinct hardware platforms. They can recover servers from a wide area network (WAN) that enables an organization to store information in different media. This way, image-based recovery helps organizations to retrieve data in minimal time.
Take The Worst-Case Scenarios Into Consideration
Disaster recovery service providers should prepare the business to face the worst situations possible. They should include every potential issue in the disaster recovery plan and ways to avoid them. The disaster recovery service provider should set SIP trunks to enable the business to communicate with their clients in the case of disasters.
Clients should have a freedom to work remotely with their internal extensions. Therefore, organizations must take approval to install generators that can run their whole system except a few remote machines.
Stay Available For The Businesses – Anytime And Anywhere
Disaster recovery service providers should communicate with each employee of the organization. It helps them contribute to the disaster recovery at an individual level. Training sessions should be organized to gather the employees and educate them about the essential steps and preventive measures to take during a disaster.
It includes the technical knowledge to quickly recover data and send it to a foreign server during a crash. Disaster recovery service providers should win an organization’s trust. Reliability helps employees accommodate the guidelines and run the plan more smoothly.
Work On Data Centers As Well
The geographical location of offsite storage is crucial for the integrity of data. The organization must place its repositories and data centers are in the places that are less vulnerable to the disasters. If they choose an alienated area, they should have the right plan and method to reach it during an emergency.
The data center should have compliance with SSAE 16 Type II and Tier 4 facilities. It should have disaster management plans that support workers in running power cycles and potential checks on a timely basis. After placing data centers, organizations should focus on fastening the process of converting the backup into a useful resource.
It protects them at the time of data loss and system downtime. However, organizations should be aware that it is impossible to recover all the data during a disaster. Therefore, the organization should create a recovery point objective (RPO). It helps them prepare an effective disaster recovery plan.
Disaster recovery service providers should use an effective recovery method with cloud support. They should devise an effective disaster recovery plan which is by the size, strength, and scope of the business. They should also not overlook essential factors like location, structure, and managerial body of the offsite storage.
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