Hurricane season is here. You may be prepared with shutters to protect your physical space, but do you have an IT backup and recovery plan in place?

Data backup and recovery preserves business and is your best defense during an unexpected outage. TeamLogic IT can help you develop a customized plan to protect your business, no matter what happens.

Business Continuity

Companies of all sizes know that a complete outage, natural disaster or malicious attack can result in an inability to access data. According to FEMA, nearly 40 percent of small businesses never reopen their doors following a disaster, because just a few inches of water can cause tens of thousands of dollars in damage.

Disaster Recovery

The following best practices for disaster recovery could help save your business.

Determine unplanned outage impacts and risks

Complete an analysis of each of the following:

• Business impacts - assign a financial value to all critical business systems, processes, functions and IT architecture, and calculate losses and other operational fallout for each in case of failure.
• Recovery time objective - how long each asset can acceptably be down.
• Recovery point objective - how much data can acceptably be lost.
• At-risk systems – list any system or function that lacks redundancy, protection or couldn’t recover quickly from an outage.

Develop a recovery strategy

Projected losses and recovery times typically drive the recovery strategy.

• Functions and applications hosted by a service provider may have disaster recovery contingencies in place.
• Make sure anything critical to your business - and not covered by a service provider - has a specific, documented recovery provision and is included in your strategy.
• List all backup support, no matter the location or provider.

Document the recovery plan

Keep the plan simple. Help your disaster recovery team create and execute a plan that is simple and quick to implement.
 
Ensure you have:

• Priorities for system recovery - multiple simultaneous failures could happen, so include the optimal recovery and restoration sequence.
• The recovery time objective for each critical function.
• Recovery procedures – assign actions to specific people and include who each person reports to, the location of data backups and current contact information for the team.
• Testing dates to evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of the plan.

Location

Data backup provides peace of mind along with data recovery. Business continuity experts recommend using backup network and storage systems at both primary and secondary sites.
 
When data is unavailable, downtime is real and costs increase. TeamLogic IT takes into account your location and can provide local, remote and hybrid solutions. The right solution depends on: how quickly a restoration can take place; protection from local disasters; full image or specific file backups; and more.

Local Backup

A local backup takes place onsite and backs up your operating system, applications and databases to a server or other backup hardware on a regular basis.

Remote Backup

Remote backups take place offsite and can range from nightly backup to cloud server virtualization.

Hybrid Solution

A hybrid solution lets you maintain primary systems onsite with secondary systems in the cloud. The advantage is that a business can quickly restore data locally and through the cloud when catastrophe strikes and facilities are inaccessible. Cloud computing allows operations and data to be shifted and duplicated quickly and can significantly shorten recovery time.
 
Whatever problem you encounter, whether during a storm or any natural or man-made disaster, TeamLogic IT is available 24/7 every day of the year to help you with technical issues and get you back to business as usual. Meet with our technicians to discuss the pros and cons of all backup options to determine the best protection for your business and get it in place before a disaster occurs.

Since 2007, TeamLogic IT has become the 36th largest IT service provider globally. Our success is driven through one core mission - to leverage technology for our customers.Thousands of businesses across the US - just like yours here in Wilmington, NC - are taking advantage of our ability to deliver highly available, secure and flexible IT systems. At TeamLogic IT, our philosophy is simple - we work with you the way we'd want someone to work with us. Visit us today in the Port City at 2901 North Kerr Ave., 910-500-1392. If email works best for you, contact me personally at [email protected].