A disaster recovery plan is your first line of defense against unexpected cyber incidents. Whether an equipment failure has occurred or a cyber criminal has attacked your business, it may become important to immediately recover and redeploy your data. Though many companies have comprehensive disaster recovery plans, there are some very common issues that are often forgotten.

Being Unable to Identify a Disaster When It Happens

What happens when a server goes down or when files disappear? Ideally, someone is alerted -- if not, a disaster recovery plan can't be engaged. There are monitoring solutions that can monitor network activity for potentially suspicious traffic, in addition to systems that can alert you if the network goes down. These systems need to be properly customized and deployed; otherwise a disaster, such as a cyber attack, could occur silently.

Failing to Empower Individuals to React and Report

Employees need to not only know how to identify a disaster but also what to do when it happens. This means they need to know who to contact. These points of contact must be further empowered to set the disaster recovery process in motion. A night manager, for instance, should be able to engage the disaster recovery software while also knowing exactly who to contact higher up the chain.

Storing Backups On the Same System

It's very easy for companies to start storing their backups on the same system, especially if they have the cloud. After all, the cloud is distributed computing -- a single file is saved multiple times on many systems. But storing a backup on any single system, even a cloud system, can be dangerous; if your cloud host provider is inaccessible, so is your data. It's absolutely important to keep redundant backups both on the cloud and on premise.

Never Testing the Disaster Recovery Plan

A disaster recovery plan needs to be both carefully documented and tested. Otherwise it's very easy to discover that you're missing some critical component. As a corollary to this, the backups themselves must also be tested. There are many companies that store tape backups or online backups without ever reviewing them; they may not notice that files haven't been properly backed up until it is too late.

There are many security firms that specialize in disaster recovery -- in addition to dedicated virtual disaster recovery software. Consulting with a professional may be the best way to protect your business from accidents and incidents. For more information, contact a business such as BluPointe.

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