Five tips on how to approach disaster recovery in the cloud
It's critical for companies to keep their businesses running in the event of a disaster: Downtime quickly means lost revenue, reduced employee productivity and a loss of brand trust. Yet, discussions with businesses quickly reveal that only 50-60% of companies have disaster recovery (DR) plans in place - and many of those plans only cover a few applications.
There is also often resistance to DR in the cloud. Here are a few best practices that smart CIOs have used to set up DR plans for the cloud. The tips come from Commvault, a global leader in information management and enterprise data protection.
- Be active! If you are not driving disaster recovery yourself, you are risking company assets on a daily basis. Better understand DR planning as a business objective and make sure your colleagues are actively aware of the plans.
- Assess the risks! DR planning should always start with a risk analysis. Determine the most likely risks and from that point, work out how best to mitigate the risks. Example: What backup does your business need in the event of a power outage?
- Prepare for the "safety card"! You may face headwinds because there are concerns about whether the cloud is as secure as on-premise solutions. When someone plays the "security card," CIOs have to counter: everything is a question of trust. After all, the enterprise works with third-party vendors every day, and there is never a 100% secure interaction between you and the vendors. There should be no distinction here.
- Don't forget the end devices! Mobility is now a top concern for CIOs. Because suddenly, the loss of corporate data due to the loss of a personal device is another possible scenario. At the same time, companies face a problem: they don't want to store personal data on in-house servers, but they need to implement DR for their mobile devices in any case. CIOs can solve this by developing employee usage policies that establish a framework for how the company handles an employee's device.
- Free disaster recovery testing from its stigma! DR testing can undermine the morale of the team responsible for DR testing and plans. Beware of this. Make it clear to your team up front that you expect trouble and testing is essential to uncovering it. In the long run, it helps to build a culture where DR testing is as normal as other test runs.
Source: www.commvault.com
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