Are You Ready for the Coming Storm?

IT Disaster Prep Can Minimize Loss and Speed Recovery

June 1^st marks the beginning of hurricane season with the Weather Company forecasting that at least three major tropical storms will threaten the U.S. Atlantic and Gulf coasts this year. Lessons learned from previous years warn that organizations should be prepared for foul weather with a sound backup plan to protect business operations. According to Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), 25 percent of companies that suffer a major disaster do not reopen and go out of business. Whether your business faces the effects of a hurricane, tornado, earthquake, fire or flood, here are some tips to prepare for the worst Mother Nature can throw at you.

Backup, Backup, Backup

Storms do more than threaten your operations with power outages and flooded facilities. Some natural disasters pack the potential punch to destroy entire buildings and everything they contain. The only sure way to completely protect your data and guarantee you can restore it after a major disaster strikes is by maintaining up-to-date duplicate data off-site in a high-security facility. Remote backups (offsite backups, online backups or managed backups) are a service that allows you to retain a secure copy of your data in a location other than your office.

Among the best backup services are cloud-based options that copy entire data systems to a remote server from which you can access your data any time and any place via an internet connection. Cloud failover ensures your business applications are available after a disaster once your servers are up again. (Acronis)

Business Continuity Planning

Disaster recovery planning plays an integral role in maintaining business continuity (BC). It comprises processes, policies and procedures related to preparing for recovery or continuation of technology infrastructure critical to an organization after a natural or human-induced disaster. In the event of a hurricane or any disaster, the main objective is to be able to retrieve your business’s valuable data from anywhere at any time.

While you probably place primary importance on getting your business up and running again, how quickly this happens may decide the extent to which a disaster affects your customers and business. The right backup system guarantees the fastest recovery of remote sites and critical systems. By having a plan in place with the right system, you minimize downtime and reduce your RTO (recovery time objective). Your RTO is the maximum acceptable amount of time for a business to recover lost data and restore operations — start to finish. When developing a BC plan, you need to establish your business’s optimum RTO and identify applications and data that are existentially critical, mission-critical and optimal for performance. Having such a plan in place along with the right backup solution will determine how quickly and completely you recover from a disaster.

Co-managed IT services

Valeo Networks’s Network Operations Center (NOC) monitors your backup 24/7/365 to ensure systems are up and running. A managed service provider, our goal is to help customers avoid unnecessary downtime by maintaining their existing critical IT environments. We engineer best-in-class solutions to maximize the confidentiality, integrity and availability of next-generation systems while lowering overall costs. Our proactive approach of monitoring, alerting and reporting allows us to identify and eliminate IT issues before they occur.

Contact Valeo Networks to review your business continuity plan and augment your backup solutions.