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Writer's pictureTrey Clark

Disaster Recovery: How to be read for any disaster

The simple fact is bad things happen. We may not want to talk about it, much less think about it, but there may come a time when a disaster strikes. Be it a fire, tornado, hurricane, or anything else you can think of, you need to be prepared. You probably already have measures in place, like an escape plan or back up fund, but what about for your technology?


Given that technology is the cornerstone of business in the modern world, it's important to keep it safe. Sadly, this is one aspect that is often overlooked in disaster preparations and can lead to some fairly nasty consequences. For example, lets say a hurricane hits your business, chances are all your computers, servers, POS terminals and anything else electronic will be fried when you come back to pick up the pieces, and that includes any information stored on them. While the hardware itself can easily be replaced with insurance funds, the data, not so much


Your data is your lifeline to your business success. It includes customer information, financials, policies, and more. The very things you need to operate on a daily basis. How do you prevent losing that in a disaster? Well, that's why you're reading this article isn't it? So enough talking about the horrible things that may one day come to pass, lets talk about how to make sure their impact is minimized as much as possible.


The first, most simple, and most crucial step is back ups. Back up everything, and I mean everything, important on your systems. I don't mean burn CD's or a separate hard drive you store in the back room either, you need to back up offsite. If a hurricane hits in Florida but your backup data is on a server in Colorado, your back ups are safe and sound, ready to be applied to your new hardware during your recovery phase. You can use a back up service like Datto, copy or store information in the cloud with Azure or OneDrive, or if you feel the need make CD's and send them to your brother in New York, although we don't suggest that last one.


Obviously if a disaster hits your brick and mortar that location is unusable until its restored, but if you run e-commerce you have an option to be back up and running faster. If you are running your e-commerce locally from your own servers, or from a local server farm you need to consider cold, warm, and hot sites. These are ready made backup locations that once turned on are ready to resume business, the difference is how fast they come up. Cold are the least expensive but take the longest to come online, hot is the most but comes up the quickest. When looking at these solutions you need to balance money spent on the service with how long you can have your e-commerce stopped to determine what works best for you.


These are the basics of disaster recovery, but you obviously shouldn't stop there. What you need to do depends on your business. While we hope you never need to recover from a disaster, its better to have a plan in place so you can keep your business moving rather than trying to put the pieces all back together while still dealing with the shock of what has just happened.


If you want a free consultation reach out to All American Cyber today and we would be happy to assist you in forming a technology disaster recovery plan tailor made to you and your business. Don't wait until its too late, plan now for the possibilities of tomorrow.




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