Thus, in today’s world, it has become necessary to have full-fledged plans to tackle such disasters. Such planning is called Data Recovery Planning.
The US government has even made it mandatory for corporations to have such contingency plans after reviewing the effects of the 9/11 terrorist attacks.
Let us now have a look at what disaster recovery planning involves.
Disaster Recovery Planning
The following things should be taken into account while making plans to prevent data loss due to disasters:
Your firm may have more than one branch. The impact of disaster on a particular unit should be thoroughly assessed depending on the importance of data it stores.
Usually, when disaster strikes, data recovery occurs in stages i.e. only a part of the data is recovered at a given time. Hence, classification of data on the basis of its importance and frequency of use is necessary. This will ensure that you have more important and frequently used data first, so that you can go about your business as usual.
Thus, if you are making use of more than one means to backup your data, it may be advisable to have the data regarding recent transactions in a medium from which data can be restored immediately.
Apart from the recovery of data, communication with your staff and your clients is necessary. The former will help your organisation in functioning efficiently, when a disaster strikes. The latter will help reduce panic among your clients.
Apart from this, the employees need to be forewarned about the necessity of working for a longer time during disaster recovery.
If you make use of remote backup utility, data from the remote sites needs to be transferred back to your office. This may involve physical transfer, if you make use of tape backup or you may need to secure a network connection with the server, if you make use of online backup.
Facilities such as backup hot sites, warm sites and cold sites are available. These terms refer to the readiness of the remote sites for backup and the services offered by the firms differ from each other depending upon the specific type of backup. Depending on the magnitude of data that you need to backup and how quickly you need it to be restored, you could choose one of these methods for backing up your important data.
The disaster recovery plan designed by your company should be tested thoroughly before implementing it. Also, frequent tests should be carried out later, to ensure that your plan helps you to cope up with the ever-changing scenario.
What Measures Can You Take to Avoid Data Loss on a Large Scale?
The easiest and the most popular way of preventing data loss, is to make backups of the data. This holds true in case of disasters as well. Here are a few tips that will help you in preventing loss of data due to disasters:
Remote backup proves to be useful. This is especially in case of disasters as physical destruction on a large scale may take place during the same. You can make use of backup media such as tapes or Microfilms and transfer them to another location manually or you can make use of online remote backup facilities.
The backed up data should be updated at regular intervals so that even the recent data is available for recovery.
In the recent years, the technology of Storage Area Networks has emerged. By making use of the same, data is available immediately without the time consuming recovery process.
Protection against power surges and power cuts should be used.
To prevent data theft and corruption, proper security software should be used.
What Type of Disaster Recovery Plan is Preferable?
If you handle large amounts of data, backing up all of it on a remote server would prove to be expensive. Instead of this, only the data that needs to be used in the immediate future should be backed up here and the rest should be saved on devices such as tape drives.
Thus, it can be seen that disaster recovery planning has become indispensable for most of the businesses today and its implementation by smaller businesses is advisable as well.
