There are a lot of things that business owners need to consider when planning their IT strategy. One thing that was very much a buzzword 10-15 years ago, but which a lot of business owners who have started in recent years don’t realize the importance of, is disaster recovery.
DR was a very big deal in the age before cloud computing and remote working. It was something that businesses of all sizes would not only work hard on a strategy for but would also test out a lot. This is because they feared that should there be a natural disaster like a fire or flood, or something like a terrorist attack on their city, they might lose all of the data stored on their on-site servers and also be unable to provide a service to their clients while their site was inaccessible to key staff.
How Things Have Changed
Nowadays, it is possible for a business to safeguard their data relatively simply with a good RAID recovery service. Data stored on the cloud is also easily retrieved, and this means that things like emails are much easier than they were before to get back. There is also the fact that many businesses now use software as a service (SaaS) solutions for their work, and so can log on to these and see all their important data and notes from other locations.
It may seem that with all this, there is no longer a need for stringent and well tested DR strategies, but this actually looks beyond the point of what DR and business continuity is all about.
Leadership is Key
The main thing to understand about DR and business continuity in the cloud age, is that cloud computing and remote working technologies only solve the technological issues. They do not provide for what exactly each key player will do in an emergency event, and how things will be kept running even if it is necessary to revert to downloading data from a back-up service and working off site.
The key responsibilities of the people involved in running a business are always as important as retaining the data that has been gathered, adhering to compliance regulations and all those other key things, when an emergency occurs. This is why having leaders that have thought seriously about these eventualities is as important now as it was in the days when offsite back-ups were a thing.
Have a Strategy and Review It Regularly
Having a full DR strategy is no less important now than it was 15 years ago, it is just much easier to do. Make sure you have one, and that it includes roles and responsibilities for these types of events. Make sure everyone is aware of it.
It may seem like modern tech can do all this stuff for you, and it can do a lot of the heavy lifting. But that doesn’t mean you can ignore how to restore your business and keep going should the unexpected happen.