Who Knew a Disaster IT Recovery Plan Needed to Account for a Global Pandemic?
For many, many years, Invision has been providing outsourced IT tech support for companies throughout Kansas City. One suggestion that our technicians try to emphasize is the importance of having an IT recovery plan in place should a disaster occur. Granted, by disaster, we meant fires, floods, power outages, tornadoes, and we still do mean those things.
When stay-at-home orders took effect in Kansas City, businesses scrambled to ensure their employees had the resources required to work remotely. Those resources might have included new software (like ppm software or employee productivity tracking tools), computers or laptops, telephony equipment, video conferencing tools and more. Once those were in place, where were employees to centralize their work or access programs and data necessary to do their jobs?
Some programs and data can be accessed in the cloud. But, there are plenty that cannot. In the event of a disaster, your company’s most critical and valuable data can be restored from a server backup, so you can get back to business as usual. As many businesses are re-opening during the global pandemic, many employees will continue to work from home for the foreseeable future.
Where Should Your Server be Located?
Anyone who’s lost a document because it wasn’t saved knows the frustration of time lost recreating it. Any business owner who’s suffered a disaster knows the heartbreak of losing their company’s vital information. Backing up documents and data on a server can help avoid frustration and loss because any data can be restored from a server and get your company back to business.
If a company server is located onsite, it is vulnerable to acts of nature like fire, flood and tornado damage. If the server is located offsite, your critical data is protected from the disaster. Perhaps you’re thinking that the off-site location is vulnerable to disasters the same as your office or facility. That’s true and good reasoning. That’s why we highly recommend having an additional backup site. This redundancy is extra insurance against losing data to a disaster, as well as against files going missing or being corrupted.
Once you’ve decided where to locate your company’s server, make sure your employees (working remotely or not) know where to save and access files and data.
READ: Why You Should Include Email Security as Part of Your IT Security Plan
How to Prioritize What Data Lives on Your Server
Your first priority is the data your business would need to get back up and running immediately. That’s the most critical data to ensure you backup on a server. Work your way to least important from there… What you need immediately, within a day and within a few days. With your data prioritized, you can schedule your backups hourly, daily, weekly accordingly.
All employees should save data in the right place on a consistent basis. Depending on the nature of your business that could mean throughout the day or once a day. This is non-negotiable especially for employees working from home. If a disaster strikes their homes or their desktop or laptop goes down, any data saved locally there goes down with it. All employees should be required to save login information for web applications and license keys for stand-alone software on file on the server, too.
READ: Remote IT Support Strategies and Tools for Working Remotely
Recently, we’ve had to add global pandemics and murder hornets to the list of dangers to a business. We won’t jinx it by listing the ways murder hornets could take a company to the brink of disaster. However, we will re-emphasize how important it is for a company to have a server as part of a larger IT recovery disaster plan, especially now with many employees working from home.
Want to learn more about installing a server to protect your company’s most vital data? Contact Kansas City’s best IT consulting group today.
