HOW TO: ENSURE BUSINESS CONTINUITY IN THE WAKE OF DISASTER
Disasters come in all shapes and sizes. They’re not just catastrophic events like hurricanes, earthquakes, tornadoes and fires but also incidents such as cyber-attacks, equipment failures and even acts of terrorism. It is imperative that companies and organizations stay prepared for any of these events by creating and maintaining a disaster recovery plan that details actions to take and processes to follow to resume mission-critical functions quickly and without major losses in revenues or business.
WHAT IS DISASTER RECOVERY?
In the IT space, disaster recovery focuses on the IT systems that help support critical business functions. The term “business continuity” is often associated with disaster recovery, but the two terms aren’t completely interchangeable. Disaster recovery is a part of business continuity, which focuses more on keeping all aspects of a business running despite the disaster. Because IT systems these days are so critical to the success of the business, disaster recovery is a main pillar in the business continuity process.
A DISASTER HAS HAPPENED. NOW WHAT?
If a disaster has occurred, it’s time to start your incident response. Incident response involves assessing the situation (knowing what hardware, software, systems, etc. were affected by the disaster), recovery of the systems and follow-up (what worked, what didn’t work, what can be improved).
ESSENTIAL ELEMENT: BACKUP
Once you get to the recovery phase of your incident response, it’s time for your backups to play their key part. But what’s the best way to handle backing up your information? In the cloud or onsite?
Benefits of the cloud include lower cost, easier deployment and the ability to test plans regularly. However, this could come with increased bandwidth needs or degrade a company’s network performance.
To assist in your backup services, you can centrally manage and automate backups using AWS (Amazon Web Services). AWS Backup is a fully managed backup service that makes it easy to centralize and automate the back up of data across AWS services in the cloud as well as on premises using the AWS Storage Gateway.
AWS Backup automates and consolidates backup tasks previously performed service-by-service. With just a few clicks, you can create policies that automate backup schedules and retention management.
AWS Backup integrates with AWS Storage Gateway, a hybrid storage service that enables your on-premises applications to seamlessly use AWS cloud storage. You can use AWS Backup to back up your on-premises environment to the secure AWS cloud.
MEET THE EXPERT
Keith T. Ellis is CEO and President of Innovation At Work, Inc. (IAW). Ellis has a master’s degree in Business Administration and has also served as the Vice President and Chief Operations Officer at Certified Technical Experts, Inc. for almost 10 years.
