Data Recovery Plan – How to Secure your Business Data from Natural Disaster?
Data Recovery Plans – Be ready for Disasters
Climate change disaster is perhaps the biggest threat today. It leads to a growing number of natural disasters like floods, earthquake, tornadoes and severe drought. These disasters are unpredictable and like human lives, it also has a catastrophic effect on businesses and their data.
Any disaster, whether natural or man-made can be disastrous. So, every business organization needs to have a data recovery plan. Here are some important things to keep in mind to secure your data:
Take an Online Backup
People often have the misconception that taking backup of their data means copying the data on another device. But what they don’t realize is that these devices are also prone to damage by floods, earthquakes or any other natural disaster. Therefore, always ensure data availability by taking backup online. This should be a part of your data recovery plan. It also ensures fast restoration of data for the continuation of the business process in no time.
Offsite Storage
It involves storing the data in disaster free areas which have multiple backup servers. Therefore, the offsite storage will safely store your data in case any natural calamity strikes an area. Also, it takes an automatic backup on scheduled time that will save your time and cost of making manual backups.
Determine the Level of Data Loss Threshold
Before preparing a recovery plan, the IT executives need to pre-determine the data loss threshold the company can realistically withstand in case of a disaster. And the amount of time the company can afford for data recovery also needs to be determined. As these two can help to know the level of investment needed in the event of a disaster.
Make a Disaster Recovery Data Plan
Write the procedures that will be implemented in case of a disaster. The measures should include the ways to identify the risks and reduce them by keeping a backup of your data through conducting regular inspections.
Communicate
The details of data recovery plan should be communicated to employees in every function so they can take some steps to ensure a minimal level of data loss in case, any disaster occurs. For example, it is a common practice of many employees to save the documents to their desktop. The company leadership must remind the employees to always save the data on a central drive for easy recovery of data in the event of a disaster.
Practice Regularly
Data recovery should be tested regularly like any other preparedness plan. How often to test, update or refresh the plan is totally up to the individual company, but practice is something that is necessary. Also, regular practicing keeps the plan fresh in everyone’s minds and the new staff members of the IT team gets a chance to know about the original plan.
Be Comprehensive
While creating a data recovery plan, it is very important to get feedback from the heads of all the departments within the company and not just IT. This will help to understand the data needs and expectations of each department.
Be Attentive to Sensitive of Data
Be it small or large scale business, it is always useful for you to know which data are sensitive and is prone to damage or how much personal data is there on site. Take an efficient backup of more sensitive data. This is useful to know because, in the case of calamity, it will be easy for you to know your loss and you can prepare for the next steps without panic. In such case, you also have the option for hard disk repair and hard disk recovery.
Test and Validate Regularly
The hard drive data recovery procedures including the normal backup procedures should be tested and validated regularly. Often the employees forget the backup infrastructures. So don’t wait for a recovery test to make sure basic disk recovery, backup, and failover procedure work.
Dispose-Off Useless Data Safely
Keep yourself prepared for potential disaster by safely disposing the useless or least required data so that it doesn’t go into wrong hands. Delete the data that is no longer required because less data on site means less to lose.
Encryption of Sensitive Data
You can minimize exposure of your data and prevent security breaches by taking a backup of your data with encryption. If natural calamity strikes and luckily the data damage is less, then you or the authorized user can only be able to access the data which will prevent any data loss of your business.
The Last Option
Sometimes the data loss may be very severe and the damages caused to your hard drives might seem irreparable. In such case, contact the data recovery services. As they can help you to recover data from hard drive and also do hard drive repair.
Data recovery services – What they do?
The data recovery service can recover deleted files or your lost data from RAID system, servers and even from your dead hard drive or hard drive reader. They also provide various services which includes, hard drive recovery, flash drive recovery, usb recovery and much more.
Which One to Choose?
In case of data loss, you should always go with professional data or hard drive recovery service providers like datadoctor.
An unqualified data recovery service can cause further damage to your data device, causing a permanent data loss beyond recovery. So it is recommended to choose your data recovery professionals wisely after all; your business data is very important.