Your company’s risk landscape is constantly changing. There’s a wide scope of factors to take into account, from weather-induced regional risks to the potential chaos provoked by cybersecurity breaches. Two vendor surveys recently found that 54 percent of organizations lack the intelligence they need to protect against sophisticated cyberattacks, and companies continue to overlook threats like ransomware and stolen credentials. As an IT manager, you need to be ready to spring toward instant recovery mode at any time, pivot your approach when needed, and keep your employees and data in line to prevent incidents before they wreak havoc.
Attempting this is messy unless you have a plan. Evaluate your risks, your strategy for weathering physical and digital storms, and your preparedness to bounce back one step at a time. Step one? Create a checklist of everything you’ll need before, during and after a disaster.
- Understanding the risks
Enterprise IT teams frequently hear from the C-level or even on the evening news about potential disaster recovery issues related to bad weather. For example, last winter’s snowfall in New England and other parts of the Northeast was a worry to countless executives. While it’s important to see disaster recovery become a crucial talking point, the truth is, most IT disasters experienced in enterprise IT don’t stem from snowstorms, tornadoes or other natural disasters. A disgruntled former employee or a simple human mistake is more likely to become a problem that leads to data loss.
Think of risk in terms of one-year, five-year, 10-year and 20-year problems, sort of like the “100-year storms” you’ve been hearing about. Once a year, an employee is going to make a mistake. Every five years, an employee or a hacker may cause a malicious attack. Every 10 years, some kind of weather-related incident may cause serious interruptions and so on. These aren’t exact figures, of course, but they frame the potential issues appropriately. Being prepared for each of these risks and dedicating appropriate time and resources to them, based on the frequency with which they’re likely to occur, will help prepare IT departments to protect data against them. - Where does your data live?
Most of us use our smartphones for work every day but remember, none of that data lives on the device. The same goes for tablets, laptops and other technologies we use to access the cloud. It doesn’t matter which information is subject to the disaster. Companies need all of their data available and secure to do business every day. The idea that losing data stored in a third-party app isn’t a disaster is a major misconception. Losing any of that data will make continuity difficult and could lead to a data disaster. Even if some of the information might not be considered the highest value, it’s the way the situation developed that could easily result in more sensitive data loss in the future. All of the data your company creates must be backed up, so every application we use has to be part of a disaster recovery solution. - Develop goals for recovery
Like other parts of IT, disaster recovery plans need clear goals and objectives to succeed. Two of these are recovery time objective (RTO) and recovery point objective (RPO). RPO refers to the frequency with which you create backups, while RTO is the amount of time you can reasonably handle for recovery. Companies define their RPO by assessing how they create data and how much they’re willing to lose after a data disaster. If you want a backup recorded every hour, you’re saying it’s OK to lose an hour’s worth of information and work. However, modern disaster recovery solutions can make entire system snapshots in five minutes, and backing up data as often as possible will promote complete continuity. RTO is equally significant, since your company can’t return to normal operations without its data. DR solutions can provide complete restorations in just a few seconds. Disaster recovery is all about returning to normal, and companies should establish RTOs and RPOs that guarantee that. - Continuity
The planning and preparedness stage will dictate the best methods and plans for IT teams to resume operations quickly. Every person at your company must understand specific parts of recovery and continuity as they pertain to their jobs. As systems come back online, teams must share information quickly and gauge usage and performance to ensure every aspect of the IT infrastructure has recovered. Most incidents that necessitate disaster recovery won’t require restoration of every piece of company data. However, some data disasters will, and it’s vital that every aspect of the ecosystem return to full working order as quickly as possible. Overlooking any data can undo an otherwise successful business continuity program. Even if information is restored, there may be minor latency extensions or other problems that only end users experience. This simply cannot be allowed to linger. It’s not true continuity if operations haven’t picked up exactly where they left off before the disaster. - Consider how you scale
Let’s assume your company, at 100 employees, experienced a data disaster and recovered all operations quickly. That was a win for everyone involved. Your company has 120 employees now, though, and they each have their own accounts and technology. Everything you implemented to bring real continuity to your team has to be tested and altered as your company grows. Twenty additional people may not seem like a lot, but these issues can snowball quickly and even one or two more people or machines can turn a great continuity program into one bound to fail unless it is updated. Growth is a great thing for a company. It means success. It means more customers and more business. It has to be managed, though. The same way new office space is acquired when new employees come on board, new technology must be integrated to support the expansion. - Learning from mistakes
Adjustments aren’t only needed as companies grow. Even if your company hasn’t expanded, it’s important to take this step. Learning from experiences is the hallmark of a successful company. The unfortunate reality of disaster recovery is that it’s going to happen again. That’s where the one-, five- and 10-year view approach comes into play. Perhaps an aspect of your infrastructure took a bit longer to come back than anticipated. For a fairly common data breach, this may not have been a big deal. However, when a hack occurs or a disgruntled employee starts deleting information, a tough-to-recover folder or server may become much more problematic. Anything of this nature needs to be altered and improved upon following the initial event to prevent it from becoming a larger problem down the road. - What happens next?
Keep improving. Even if it’s been six months since any data disaster scenarios and your program worked perfectly the one time you called it into action, there may be a new technology available that can make the process even simpler. Navigating a disaster successfully is not the end of the process. The threats we face are going change. That landscape we considered to start this process is going to be vastly different a month from now than it is today. Everything needs to evolve to keep your business prepared to respond to the next disaster.
Ian McChord is product director of Datto, where he leads the company product roadmap with responsibilities in product marketing and business development.
