Many businesses run throughout the day, 7 days a week. With the tech world advancing so rapidly, they cannot afford to be left behind. Hence the need for little to none downtime. Especially, Businesses carrying sensitive mission-critical client’s data need to keep it secure and ensure business continuity.
Other than this, there are several compliant regulations that business need to follow in order to operate and that can only be done if your business has business continuity. As in order to maintain a reputation in the market, a business has to stay industry compliant and business continuity helps achieve this.
Encrypt your Data
The first and very basic step, which would come in the mind of any IT person is to ensure that their data is properly encrypted, before transit, during transit and after transit. This prevents exposure if your data happens to fall into the wrong hands.
Files are typically stored on the cloud and only authorized personnel can access them with the proper credentials.
Businesses who do not follow encryption methods can fall victim to cyber-attacks, including ransomware and malware, which would, in return, stop operations, resulting in downtime and denting the goal of achieving business continuity.
Setup a Backup & Disaster Recovery Appliance
Disaster can happen at any given time and at any place without any prior notice. Although you can predict it, you can most certainly not prevent it. Setting up a backup disaster recovery appliance or a cloud based disaster recovery solution can help greatly in protecting your data.
Having a DR Backup in place will allow you to restore your data and systems with RTOs less than 15 minutes, which will help you continue your operations quickly and achieve business continuity.
Even if your businesses’ primary site is compromised, you can access your files from another remote location and restore them, this way you are not limited to any single location and can basically work form anywhere, as long you have a stable internet connect of course.
Test your Backup and Disaster Recovery Plan
Getting a disaster recovery backup solution is great but it is not the end to it. You cannot simply just get a DR Backup Appliance and forget about it. That is not the recommended approach.
Testing your DR plan is as much important as setting it up Make sure to test your backup and disaster recovery plan regularly and look for any errors and bugs. It is not a complex process; your IT head can easily do it but doing this is essential.
Through regular testing of your DR plan, you will be able to test whether your plan is working fine or not and if, for some reason it is not recovering files or there is some error, you can jot down exactly what’s the issue and get to the bottom of it. As a DR plan is not good enough if it won’t work at the time where data recovery is actually needed.
There is no need to test your DR plan weekly or daily. Whenever there is a change in the system or if, for some reason, the DR plan changes, and then it is vital to test the plan for the changed instances and parameters. Azure cloud backup is a good option for effective Cloud backups.
Conclusion
Business continuity has become a basic need nowadays for all the businesses who cannot afford downtime. Setting up a backup and disaster recovery plan not only protects the business against many cyber-threats and natural disasters but also ensures business continuity to the highest level.
