Every organization will likely encounter a data disaster of some magnitude. The defining moment is how well prepared your organization is to handle a disaster recovery. Because of cost barriers and legacy technology, developing a disaster recovery plan can be a struggle for mid-sized businesses. Here are some basic, low-effort strategies for preventing and handling data loss.
Data disasters come in various shapes and sizes. Take a look around your organization, there’s a good chance that a familiar face might be a data disaster culprit someday. Pure carelessness amongst employees is the number one cause of data loss. Whether an employee misplaces a device connected to the company network or accidently deletes important information, human error tops the list of data vulnerabilities. Other vulnerabilities are less predictable and include environmental factors, hardware/software malfunction, malware and power outages.
All mid-sized organizations are dependent on data. However, there are layers of data dependency within each company. An accounting department might require immediate access to information, while a marketing department could probably wait a few days before gaining access to recovered data. When laying out a disaster recovery plan, it’s important to identify critical systems to maintain a level of operation.
After an organization has determined critical systems, it’s important to develop a strategy for data loss prevention. This will include educating all staff on strengthening passwords, updating systems and simple email phishing awareness. IT departments should have strong internal security measures in place to reduce the number of human errors and other security vulnerabilities.
Organizations need to lay out a complete plan for each critical system during data downtime. Think about how different departments will step in. What needs to happen to make sure the company is running as smoothly as possible during a data loss situation? Having a well thought out response strategy, and communicating that strategy to the entire team, will minimize the chaos and questions during system downtime.
Once the response strategy has been fully implemented, organizations can start to look at their recovery strategy. This is when companies can begin to recover data from an external source, such as offsite storage or the cloud, and ask questions about what caused the loss and how it can be fixed.
Remember, it is important to check that disaster recovery solutions are working periodically so that important data is protected. The second worst possible scenario to suffering a data disaster is to not have a functioning data disaster solution.