How to Easily Make and Keep Your Data Safe

Is your organization prepared if disaster strikes?

Hurricane Harvey is expected to cause $180 billion dollars of economic damage. Imagine if you were a business headquartered in an area affected by a natural disaster and had all your data stored on-site. You’ve probably been thinking about backing up all your businesses data to the cloud, but haven’t gotten around to it yet.

What would that do to your business? How easy would it be for you to get back to “business as usual?”

Would Your Organization Survive?

In the aftermath of the devastation caused by hurricanes Harvey, Irma, and Maria, it’s vital for your organization to examine your disaster recovery strategy and plan for dealing with the unexpected—especially if your organization relies heavily on the data you have.

[pullquote]“As companies have increased dependence on IT systems to deliver their services more quickly, the ability to recover from the effects of disasters has become more important and more complex.” –Gartner[/pullquote]

Moving your mission-critical data to the cloud is a great first step. Cloud technologies can be implemented for business continuity through automated disaster recovery or for fully-hosted production workloads providing native continuity, increased reliability, security, and redundancy.

Talk to a cloud expert today about your disaster recovery plans and moving to the cloud. Click here to sign up for a free 1-hour risk consultation to review your current plans, goals, and requirements.

How To Be (and Stay) Prepared

Leveraging cloud technologies can enable organizations to recover in near real-time through automation and native cloud services.[pullquote]“Executives affected by these disasters — and those who witness them — recognize the need to plan for these unexpected events. Identifying the most critical business functions and how much investment is required to protect them is critical.” –Gartner[/pullquote]

You should be able to focus on your business and organizational mission. By leveraging the cloud, you can do just that. Whether it’s for disaster recovery or if you’re using a full production hosting enabled solution, you’ll be able to conduct “business as usual” without worrying about technology.

Cloud technologies allow for complete customization of workloads, allowing organizations to protect all of their assets – or just the ones deemed most critical to their operations.

How to Prepare in 3 Simple Steps:

Step 1 – Identify All Mission Critical Data and Resources

You’ve probably heard the quote by Ben Franklin, “By failing to prepare you are preparing to fail.”

Start with making a list of all the key data about your operations and the potential impact if you lost that data. A business impact analysis is a good start to outlining your requirements.

• • List all your organization’s functions for each unit
  • Survey your team members and figure out what’s a “need to have” for them
  • Identify all the mission-critical and organization-critical functions
  • Identify the applications and workloads supporting these critical business unit functions

Step 2 – Define Impact Data and Recovery Practices

Making sure you know what’s mission critical for your organization is important. Combine your requirements and objectives to make sure you get a sense of your organization’s true needs. Take financial and non-financial impacts (speed, peace of mind and sanity) into account.

Now it’s time to figure out and define your recovery point objective and recovery time objective, making sure your organization is up and running as soon as possible to your standards.

Step 3 – Get Company Buy In & Update As-Needed

Update your findings regularly, and ensure your team and executive sponsors are onboard and in the know. When you’re informing everyone, make sure you have your key findings and the implementation priority recommendations.

The best practice is to review your business impact analysis annually and update your business processes as needed.

Your Disaster Recovery Preparation Starts Today

Are you prepared for a disaster? A hurricane, earthquake, flood? What about a datacenter failure, hardware outage, or an operational mistake?

Contact AIS today and find out how the cloud can be used to enable business continuity through disaster recovery or complete production hosting.