The 2020 hurricane season was one for the record books – and not in a good way.
There were so many hurricanes in the Atlantic that they burned through the 21 pre-determined storm names for the season and started using letters from the Greek alphabet to supplement. According to AccuWeather, the overall economic damage totaled somewhere between $60 and $65 billion.
Despite all the warning signs, organizations still leave themselves vulnerable to future catastrophes. But it doesn’t have to be that way if you’re willing to prepare in advance of any potential disasters.
Here’s how to prepare your business for the next hurricane or any disaster.
Reexamine your disaster recovery plans and processes
Start by reexamining your disaster recovery (DR) plans and processes.
Make sure you have a copy of your data stored off-site and a plan in place to recover your business if a storm hits.
Don’t forget to continually update your recovery procedures and communicate them clearly to your team, as well as your vendors and service providers.
There are four actions you should take to ensure your DR plan is successful:
1. Understand your application priorities. Identify your mission-critical applications and ensure they’re recovered first.
2. Map application interdependencies. Mapping your assets and their relationships lets you see which applications depend on each other and which servers they run on. That way you’ll know how the disruption of one application will influence another.
3. Define your data protection strategy. Know how much data you can afford to lose and adjust your data protection strategy based on the criticality of your applications. For mission-critical applications, continuous data replication is typically best.
4. Test your plan regularly. Testing is the only way to discover issues and fix them ahead of time, as well as make sure you’re ready for a disaster
Other factors to consider
As you review your DR recovery plans and processes, consider what technologies may be helpful during recovery and failover. Cloud recovery is a worthwhile option. It’s flexible, cost-effective, accelerates recovery and makes data replication across your network easy.
Additionally, think about who’s going to execute your DR plan. Do you have the resources in-house, or are you better off relying on an outside service provider? If your team can’t get to your remote site, your DR plan will quickly unravel. With a partner to manage the recovery for you, you can concentrate on your primary site.
The 2020 hurricane season was among the most destructive we’ve ever seen. Many organizations weren’t properly prepared, and it cost them. By reexamining your DR plans and processes, and taking the steps to ensure it’s up to par, you’ll be better prepared when the next storm rolls in.
