Data resiliency and disaster recovery

By Michael
October 12, 2012

There are concerns, understandably, about how well entities will be able to cope with physical or digital disasters. Many of these companies are not instituting best practices for continuity, despite the multitude of resources that are available. Regulating the amount of downtime a business experiences due to an attack or a severe storm is critical to keeping an entity in operation, as too much time spent with the doors closed could result in an inability to get back on its feet.

Monitoring internal function
Companies often keep track of the information they use on a daily basis, but they also store away critical files that are not of use regularly in order to protect their integrity. The ability to recall mission-intensive files during a disaster is what can make or break a company, and the longer it takes to retrieve these documents, the worse the odds become for recovery.

According to InformationWeek, resilience in the data structure should encompass files of all kinds, but in the event that such reliability is not present, the entirety of a business could suffer. Much of what comprises the inner workings of modern entities is online-based, the source pointed out, meaning that even an hour of server maintenance could pose an impediment to consumers and employees at all levels of the company. Imagine that a business that operates entirely out of the cloud suddenly has no access to the internet – that whole company is at a stand-still, wasting man hours and spending more to scramble for an IT fix than if it had copies of programs in an offline structure ready to pick up the slack.

The importance of leadership
In order to obtain and maintain inclusive systems in a more productive fashion, companies need to make sure that everyone from the top of the organization to the bottom understands these tools and their part in protecting them. CIO Online wrote that administrators should take a stance on these issues, following up with their own personnel to ensure compliance measures are being met. As the source pointed out, simply having a backup resource offline somewhere is not enough – there should be regular tests and reviews of these systems to ensure that they actually work before too much reliance is placed on them.

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