How to Prepare Your Business For An IT Disaster

Yes, a hurricane could happen or a tornado, but what network admins are really worried about is an IT disaster. When your hard drive goes down, it can do a lot more damage than just tossing your file cabinets around. As IT consultants, our job is to assume not whether your IT equipment will fail, but when and how we are going to prepare for it. Think of it as a fire escape plan for your infrastructure.

Here are a few steps you can take to prepare your company for an IT disaster:

Back It Up

Unlike in an earthquake or house fire, you can save all of your files in an IT disaster, digitally. Backing up your files makes life a lot easier if your computer crashes, to reboot and recover. When deciding on how often to schedule your backups, ask yourself “how much data am I willing to lose?” One day, two days, a full week? Many companies schedule backups on a daily basis and others schedule for once a week. It truly depends on the industry and the users. Having your admin put in place a scheduled backup is essential for maintaining a disaster-friendly IT environment.

Check Those Logs

Another thing to remember is making sure that your automated backups are, in fact, backing up. Many times, as consultants, we hear horror stories of companies with a backup system in place that fails to backup without anyone knowing. Unfortunately, not checking your logs regularly can result in a complete disaster.

Software backups

Now if your entire system fails, you can either upgrade that operating system or reinstall it. If you choose to reinstall, having on hand activation keys and serial numbers is quite helpful. Why not get these together sooner rather than later? Creating a backup list for each of your systems can save you time and headaches later.

Hardware backups

How long can you go without those critical systems? Say your tower fails, are you set up to work on your laptop without skipping a beat? If your server goes down, have another system that can temporarily stand in. For example, virtualization in this circumstance would be quite useful.

Conclusion

In conclusion, you never know when an IT disaster will happen and if you’re not prepared, it can be too late to do much about it. Get your recovery plan together and make sure your staff understands all of the necessary steps to getting you and your IT environment disaster-friendly.