It’s already happened to you. You’ve suffered a data disaster. What comes next for you and your organization can make all the difference in the world. Recovering from a loss of data is never an easy process. That’s why you must create a disaster recovery plan before it happens; or unfortunately in some cases… before it happens again.
The following ten steps should be on your disaster response checklist:
1. Diagnose potential threats (fire, human error, power loss, system failure, security breach, etc). Even if you don’t think pertains to you, expect the unexpected.
2. Rank your organization’s most serious vulnerabilities. A common one happens to be outdated security and backup power systems.
3. Look back at past outages and disruptions involving your organization. How was the situation handled? What was learned from the experience? Any lessons learned can go a long way towards the next time.
4. Pick an acceptable outage time for a disruption to your normal work environment. What would be your company’s breaking point? A week? A month?
5. Check regular industry practices. It never hurts to learn from your competitors. Find out what they have done in the past with similar situations.
6. Make sure your entire staff are trained expertly in responding to an emergency like data disruption. You are in this together.
7. Set timely goals and requirements during the crisis. It will keep everyone focused.
8. Identify team managers for each department that could be affected. In a time of crisis, leadership is needed.
9. Assign and establish team roles and responsibilities. Some multi-tasking will most likely be needed to get back to normal.
10. Soon after a breach, determine the damage done and then notify all customers, or consumers, or business partners to ensure them that everything is under control.
In the past few months, we have seen companies hurt by hurricanes, fires, and cyber attacks. No matter how your files and folders got damaged, whether it was due to a virus attack or a horror of nature, the bottom line is that you cannot access your data. Get with your team and prepare that checklist, so the road to data recovery is a smooth one.
