Page 17 - Expert Issue 2015 (2)

4 Steps To Starting Your Disaster Recovery Plan

By Kathy David Photo courtesy of Kathy David

San Diego County is a beautiful, and undoubtedly one of the best
places to live in the nation, but San Diego County is prone to dangerous That way, if some-
wildfires almost year around. thing, say their
firewall, goes down,
Without fail, whenever a natural disaster or another emergency situa- they can easily
tion happens, business owners’ panic, understandably concerned with replace it with their
whether or not they can trust that their business data will be totally backup hardware.
protected.

Three companies we provide I.T. services for were threatened during If you’re ready to
the last round of wildfires. Two of these clients were already set up for update your sys-
remote and cloud backup, but the third client had opted out of these tems, consider hav-
services. ing your infrastruc-
ture completely on
The wildfire was closing in on this clients office, eventually getting as the cloud.
close as right across the street, so they were forced to evacuate their
offices. In a rush, they had forgotten to grab their external drive, and 4 Most of the time,
called us asking, “Please, can you back up our data right now?” when your server
If you take nothing else away from this article, please take this: You is on the cloud,
don’t want to wait until the last minute to make sure that your data is backup is auto-
protected in the event of a disaster. Disaster Recovery Planning should matically in place.
be something that you’re thinking about right now. Replication can
also be put in place
Right now, ask yourself, “How many days can my business and I afford relatively easily.
to be down if there’s a disaster, a burglary or a hardware crash?”
Most business owners, especially small business owners, don’t think For help developing your business’s disaster recovery plan, call IT
about this until it happens to them. By that time, they’re down for weeks, Tech Pros, Inc. at 760.913.4700.
and they’re spending an arm and a leg just to restore their information
and their network.
Don’t put yourself in this position. Instead, implement a multi-level San Diego
approach to protect the data in your business. That way, you’ll have a Woman
failover; In case one channel fails, you’ll have another one to back it up.

Here are 4 ways that you can protect your data before disaster strikes.

1 A regular backup server simply back up files. If a server crashes, then 17
we would have to do a brand new build for that client, restoring all of
the files that we had backed up, which can take up to a week or two. On
top of that, if your hardware can’t be restored, we would have to order
a new server, which takes three to five days to arrive, at which time we
would have to reinstall everything and restore the files.

That’s why, with an On-Premise, Traditional network, we typically rec-
ommend that you have both a local data backup solution and a system
that takes an image of the state of your network itself.
Taking a mirror image of the configuration of the operating system on a
regular basis allows us to easily mount this image on similar or dissimi-
lar hardware, backing up and restoring your system in a matter of hours
rather than over days or even weeks.
2 In addition to your On-Premise backup solution, you also want to get a
second layer and backup your data using the cloud.
2015 Backing up your data on the cloud protects you protects you in case
you lose everything—For instance, if you’re burglarized and everything
is taken, if your office building burns down, or if the hardware that your
backup image sits on fails.
Cloud data backup is simply an additional layer of protection.
3 To be protected, you also want to have backup hardware ready to go.

Some of our clients will have backup hardware ready to go for the
server, the switched, the firewall, and whatever other components that
they have on their network, so that they have what we call a hot swap
ready to go.