‘Hope for the best, prepare for the worst’. It’s a phrase~every business should take heed of, particularly when safeguarding company data. With failure to protect data frequently~leading to disruption and substantial losses,~here are four~quick and easy ways to protect your business from disaster:

Analyse your data

All data is not equal. Some is more important than others, and planning for the worst means deciding what data to recover first. By evaluating your data and grouping it into categories, you can begin to see what data matters most to you. This not only makes the recovery more manageable, it also helps you see the value of the data against the cost of protecting it.

For example, category one might include data that’s essential to your operations and/or confidential. Category two might be less frequently accessed data. Category three on the other hand might include rarely accessed data that is only being retained until its data retention date is met. This will vary depending on the type of data being held.

Protect with back-up

Replication is a key element in disaster recovery, and refers to the importance of keeping data in two places: onsite for near-line recovery and offsite for disaster recovery. With the cloud restricted in the amount of data it can consume daily, placing data offsite or shipping tapes to another site is crucial in recovering~large volumes of data. Copying data from a host computer to a computer offsite also establishes redundant copies and ensures business continuity in the event of a disaster.

Assess the time

You need to know how much data you have to establish how long it will take to recover and whether that’s adequate for your needs.~For example, if you have 20 terabytes (TBs) of data but connections only process 10 TBs per day, recovery could take 48 hours or more. If that’s too long, it may be time to invest in more bandwidth.

Practice and perfect

How will you know your recovery plan will go to plan unless you test it? The best way to do this is to have a trial disaster within your organization to see how long recovery takes. You might get a few ‘do we have to’ comments from staff but time spent on testing and perfecting the recovery plan at least once a year will be time well spent.

For more advice on DRPs, read ‘What Pompeii Teaches Us About Disaster Recovery Plans’.