Does your business plan include disaster recovery procedures? The terribly sad loss of life and property caused by Hurricane Katrina will continue to dominate the news for the weeks and months to come, but, on a smaller scale, I wonder how all the small businesses that were affected by Katrina will recover? What happened to all their business records? Will they be able to recover all their computers and the data held on those computers?
This is a good time to re-evaluate your backup and recovery procedures. Begin the process by preparing an assessment of your computers and records what assets are critical for your business to operate?
Next, allocate the resources (money and manpower) to sufficiently protect, recover, and restore, those assets. This could involve purchasing extra backup devices, spare computers, off-site backup storage, and off-site office space to store extra computers and office equipment.
Then, develop your disaster recovery plan. This plan should include details of who is responsible for backups, where those backups are stored, and what should happen in the event a disaster occurs.
Finally, you should test your disaster recovery plan. This includes making sure your off-site assets are working and that your backup media can be restored.
Though you may not experience a hurricane, businesses can be ravaged by fire, flooding, theft, tornados, earthquakes, terrorist attack, loss of electricity, and even computer viruses. Please, set aside some time to prepare and review your disaster recovery processes and if they need to be updated and improved, do it now!